Closing Time: A True Story of Robbery and Double Murder Page 11

  The defendant, Richard Anderson Perry, should be, and he is hereby, restrained and ordered by this court from granting any interviews or making any statements to the press, radio, television, or other members of the news and television media until after the completion of the trial of the defendant Damon Peterson, a/k/a Damon Malantino, a/k/a Eugene Perry, which is set for trial on May 4, 1981.

  That order foiled any other plans of Cromwell and Park for pretrial publicity, but they still had gotten the word out and ruffled the feathers of local law enforcement.

  Sam Hugh Park, a man in his late thirties, had no way of knowing that in four months his very own mother would be found dead in her home on top of Log Town Hill in Van Buren. And that he would be the only suspect the police would pursue.1 Thus, while embroiled in a murder defense case that should have taken all his time and energy, he was also in the unenviable position of having to fend off the very prosecutors and law enforcement officers who were on the opposing side in the biggest criminal case of his young career. For a man trying to revive his career with his court-appointed defense of Anderson, his mother’s death and the accusations that followed took their toll. He performed in the courtroom surprisingly well and passionately helped represent his client.

  It would be his last hurrah.

  1 See best-selling true crime book Blind Rage, also by Anita Paddock, available at Amazon.com and elsewhere.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Where is Cindy Sue Brown? That’s what everyone wanted to know. She wasn’t the key witness, but she was definitely a witness that Georgia and Arkansas authorities wanted to find. She and Perry were a couple. She knew things about Perry that probably no one else knew.

  Cindy had known that Perry had not been truthful with Anderson about the money they’d received from the sale of the stolen jewelry. Perry had held some jewelry back with one of his pals in Atlanta. When the time was right, he told Cindy, just the two of them would go back to Atlanta and finish the sale.

  When Anderson and Perry were arrested by Jacksonville Beach police on the night of September 23rd, 1980, following the shootout at the motel and tavern, Cindy Sue Brown took off. A good bet was that she went to Atlanta and sold the rest of the jewelry to the fence who was holding it for their return.

  Cindy had been Perry’s girlfriend off and on for several years. Her grandmother lived in the same town in Alabama as Perry, and Cindy spent lots of time living with her grandmother.

  Cindy and Perry were interested in the same thing: sex, drugs, and booze. She’d been smoking marijuana since she was thirteen and graduated to hard drugs. That those two would meet seemed almost like destiny.

  But Cindy was afraid of Perry. He had once broken her ankle when she tried to leave him. When he had called her from a Florida prison and demanded she meet him at Camp Paradise in Tyrone, Georgia, she went.

  Now she was nowhere to be found and wouldn’t be for a couple of years, long after the trials of Perry and Anderson were concluded.

  Eventually, Arkansas authorities would catch up with her. She had fled to Texas and then California, where she was arrested for prostitution. Georgia grabbed her and charged her as an accessory to the campground murders and imprisoned her on a lesser charge. After Georgia paroled her, she was arrested by Van Buren police and charged with conspiracy to commit robbery, a charge previously filed in 1983 in connection with the Staton robbery and murders.

  During her six-month confinement in the Crawford County Jail and a hospital stay for an emergency hysterectomy, she became the recipient of prayers from a local group of ladies from Van Buren and Alma.

  On Monday, February 11th, 1985, she apologized to the Staton family and pleaded no contest to the charges. She explained that all her trouble stemmed from her association with Perry and drugs. She told the court that both of her parents died violently: her mother by suicide, and her father by murder. She claimed she had been an honor student and president of her high school’s student body.

  She was transferred to the state women’s prison in Pine Bluff, where she was soon paroled and never heard from again.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Damon Peterson (the name he was known by at that time by Arkansas officials) was returned to Arkansas to stand trial for murder on February 6th, 1981. He’d received ten years for the shootings in Jacksonville Beach.

  Ron Fields had hoped Florida would allow the suspect to be tried first in Arkansas, and a “Demand for a Speedy Trial” had even been filed against the state of Arkansas by Eugene Wallace Perry/Malantino. Florida wanted him first though, so they kept him until they tried him.

  The Georgia authorities would wait to try him after they saw what would happen to him in Arkansas.

  Back on September 30th, 1980, Georgia investigators had questioned Eugene Wallace Perry (the name he was known by in Georgia) about the time he’d spent at Camper’s Paradise in Tyrone, Georgia, from June 1980 to the end of August 1980. Perry said he’d lived there under the alias of Jim Jackson or Pop-Up Jim. He said he’d known Barbara Price and Allen Price very well, and that Barbara Price knew he was using an alias, and that they often smoked marijuana together. He said he left the campgrounds on August 23rd, 1980, just a few days before she and her son were killed, and that he was horrified to think that anyone could possibly accuse him of killing Barbara and her son. He also told the Georgia authorities that Richard Anderson was not in Georgia at the campgrounds, and he hadn’t met him until much later.

  Upon arrival by car driven by Sheriff Ball and Wayne Hicks of the Van Buren Police Department, Peterson/Perry was ushered into the Crawford County Courthouse holding cells where he was fingerprinted, photographed, and strip searched. There were no tattoos to be seen.

  They then went to the sheriff’s office to wait for Ron Fields to interview Peterson/Perry and possibly get a statement. It was a twelve-hour drive from Florida, and Ball and Hicks were tired and ready to go home and get some sleep.

  When Ron Fields arrived, they were both sitting down with the suspect, drinking coffee. Fields was surprised at Peterson/Perry’s change of appearance since he’d seen him last in September. He wore a red plaid shirt, and his hair was short and dark and straight and parted on the side. He looked like a school teacher or maybe a hardware clerk.

  Fields and Peterson/Perry exchanged greetings.

  “They haven’t appointed you an attorney yet. I suspect it will be two, but that’s up to the court.”

  “Have you talked to my attorney in Florida?”

  “Kaylor? The public defender?”

  “Yes,” Fields said. “He was most interested in our case here in Arkansas. I entered a plea down there. I wasn’t the one who shot up the tavern so those charges of attempted murder were dropped. Course what I was hoping for was federal time.”

  “I hear life is easier in federal prison. By the way,” Fields asked, “what name do we call you?” He paused a moment. “You were first charged in Jacksonville Beach as Malantino. Damon Malantino. What about Damon Peterson?”

  “Call me Gene Perry, but you might just say aka/Damon Peterson or aka/Damon Malantino. I understand there’s been some serious implications against me.”

  “Yes,” Fields said and handed a shorter version of Anderson’s statement to Perry to read.

  Perry read the statement, mouthing the words as he read.

  Fields gave him a few minutes.

  “Now, if you’d like to say anything, like to give your side of the story, you can put everything in your statement. I must tell you that Anderson made a very good appearance on TV yesterday. He’s a baby-faced, easy-go-lucky guy that was dominated by an evil personality, according to him. Anderson said you bought guns and silencers, spent money on high-class hotels. Your name is on everything—Damon Peterson, that is.”

  “But the basic thing remains is that he’s lying. But I’m not him—Damon Peterson—you see. I’m Gene Perry.”

  “If you want to make a statement, then do so, and we’ll check it out just lik
e we did Anderson’s. He told us he met you at a campground, robbed the jewelry store in Van Buren, and fled to Atlanta, where you fenced the diamonds. Everything he said checks out. Only he says you murdered the Statons. He just tied them up.”

  Perry tossed the statement on the desk like it was yesterday’s newspaper.

  “I don’t want to be electrocuted. I don’t even want to get life in prison without parole. Not for this. I don’t want to implicate myself in any kind of way or in any way that if I was—I’m not saying I was—if I was connected in any kind of way, but I don’t want to implicate myself in any way at this time.”

  Fields nodded. “I understand that, but what I’m saying—”

  Perry interrupted Fields with, “He may be putting me here and there, and there may be ten thousand eye witnesses, but the fact remains about that jewelry store thing.”

  Fields continued to listen, encouraging Perry to keep talking.

  “Tell your side, so we can check it out.”

  “Now, I’m the type that needs all the help I can get. I could tell the truth, but it might be damaging to me. That’s why I’m waiting on my lawyers.”

  “We’ve got the blue and white Cadillac, the pop-up camper, and the Plymouth you traded the Cadillac for. We’ve got the Horseshoe Bend registration at Beaver Lake. So many things with Damon’s name on them.”

  Perry shifted around in his chair. “Goddamn! Maybe I’m guilty of camping out somewhere, but that don’t make me a jewelry store robber.”

  Ball and Fields looked at each other. Their facial expressions didn’t change, but somehow a mental message passed between them. We got him. Perry didn’t realize it, but he’d just placed himself in a most perilous position.

  “Well,” said Fields, “do you want to tell us what all you did those days at Beaver Lake?”

  “When can you appoint me an attorney?”

  “As I’ve said, I can’t appoint you one. I’ll tell the judge that you need one, and he can take it from there.”

  “That’s right. There’s so much here, and it does involve my life. I may be making the biggest mistake of my life by not laying it right on the table here and now.”

  Fields motioned to Sheriff Ball. “Are you ready to take him up to his cell?”

  Sheriff Ball gave a conspiratorial hint of a smile and said, “Sure thing, sir.”

  Perry and Anderson would be spending the night in jail under the same roof, under the same scattered nighttime clouds, under the same fingernail moon that hung over the Van Buren homes of Kenneth Staton and Suzanne Ware. It cast only a sliver of light now, but by and by, it would become a full moon triumphantly hanging over the town.

  If Ruth Staton slept a little sounder that night, or perhaps more peacefully, no one will ever know for sure, but one man, Ron Fields, hoped that she did.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Even the newspapers couldn’t get Perry’s name correct because the headlines on Saturday, February 7th, 1981, of the Southwest Times Record read, “Suspect Returned: Peterson’s hearing to be next week.”

  Perry (finally under his official name as determined by his birth certificate) was moved to the Sebastian County Jail by Sheriff Bill Cauthron to a maximum-security cell. He had two attorneys appointed to represent him against a charge of capital murder: Ron Harrison and Steve Sharum, men who both lived in Fort Smith.

  They immediately set a plan in motion to change the venue for the court trials—that their client couldn’t get a fair trial in the Crawford County Courthouse in Van Buren because of the publicity surrounding the murders on September 10th, 1980. Eventually the venue was changed to the Sebastian County Courthouse in Fort Smith, just across the river from Van Buren. There were plenty of scoffs made about that “change of venue,” including petitions signed by lawyers and laymen alike who disagreed with the decision. Alas, the petitions failed, and Judge David Partain of the Twelfth Judicial Circuit set the trial dates for both men in mid-March.

  But when a star witness, Chantina Ginn, Rick Anderson’s girl friend, who could account for his first time ever meeting with Perry at Beaver Lake, was unable to travel due to a serious motorcycle accident, the case was postponed. The prosecuting attorney’s office received the report from Chantina’s doctor, Doctor David E. Thurman at the Orthopedic Clinic of Topeka, stating she was in a serious motorcycle accident on April 19th, 1981, in which she sustained a severe open injury above the left knee with fracturing and loss of bone, both of the end of the femur and upper tibia. She underwent prolonged surgery the day of the admission for repair and subsequently had been confined to the hospital. He estimated she would be in a cast for the next two to three months and would require skin and wound care.

  Judge David Partain granted a postponement and scheduled July 23rd, 1981, to be the trial date. He quietly pondered on this case that was full of tragedy. A young girl just out of high school jumps on the back of a motorcycle with a handsome young man and ends up being a star witness in two capital murder trials. And once again, she jumps on the back of a motorcycle and ends up seriously wounded.

  The thrill of a ride on a motorcycle with a good-looking man was not worth the risk.

  From pretrial depositions, both sides knew that Chantina would testify that she had met Anderson in Topeka, Kansas, and that they had traveled by motorcycle to camp out at Beaver Lake in Arkansas, and that, there, they met Damon Peterson and Loralei Peterson for the first time. She would also testify that Anderson and Peterson returned to their camp after a short trip with two orange nylon bags full of jewelry, and that the four of them traveled to Atlanta and then to Florida. Her testimony was crucially important to Ron Fields’s case against Perry, as well as to Anderson, who was going to have to face a Georgia murder charge after the Staton trial.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Opening arguments began after a jury was chosen that included Dennis Meeks, Norma Hale, Judith Willcoxon, Judith Hogan, Rubin E. Jester, Alva Harman, Linda Kennon, Carmelita Harrison, Robert Heinold, Mary June Moore, Theodore Applegate, and Lawrence E. Sharum, Jr. (no relation to the defendant’s attorney, Steve Sharum).

  Eugene Wallace Perry, clad in a dark suit provided by the county, was seated at the defense table across a wide space from where the prosecutors sat at a similar table. Each of the tables was mahogany, well-worn, and situated in front of the raised mahogany paneled bench where the judge sat.

  The long, darkly paneled courtroom was about half full, and the spectators were separated from where the lawyers and judge sat by a mahogany fence and gate. It was obvious that the architect and the carpenters had used care and pride in the building of that courtroom.

  The security people stood up front, and both Sheriff Trellon Ball and Sheriff Bill Cauthron stood silently at the back of the room. There had been rumors that the Mafia would try to help Perry escape.

  Janet traveled from Paris, Texas, to attend the trial. Since she would not be testifying, she was allowed to be in the courtroom. The other members of the family—Ruth, Karen, and Elaine—waited in the hallway for when each would be called to testify. The benches they sat on had clearly been there for a long time since initials and dates and names had been carved into the wood by anxious or angry people that didn’t know any better. Or perhaps they did, and carving graffiti on the benches was a way to thumb their noses at the court system.

  The Staton women were prepared mentally and emotionally to testify. All three would say what needed to be said, nothing more. If they were frightened to sit in the same room with the man who killed Kenneth and Suzanne, they surely would not let him know it. For the past ten months, they’d been in survival mode, not allowing themselves to break down. The word “stoic” had been created with them in mind.

  By the time Ron Fields spoke to the jury, he knew the case inside and out. He had such sympathy and admiration for the Staton family that he had become quite passionate about the case. He wanted to do his very best to see that Perry got the death sentence for his crimes. He was certain P
erry was a cold-blooded killer who had shown no remorse or compassion.

  Ron Fields, dressed in a navy suit, starched white shirt, and maroon tie, began his opening by looking directly at the jury with a look of high regard for their position. His demeanor was serious, but not autocratic or boastful, as if he was the most intelligent man in the room. He appeared sincere in his representation of the two people who couldn’t speak for themselves: a daddy and his youngest daughter.

  Ron Fields began: “Now this case actually starts prior to September 10th, 1980, when two people get together up at Rogers, Arkansas, to decide that they are going to rob a jewelry store located in the Cloverleaf Plaza in Van Buren on the Wednesday, the 10th of September. Those people are known to us as a man named Damon Peterson, who uses some other names also, and Richard Phillip Anderson. Now they plan out this robbery, and they take along some rope and gags, and they plan things by surveillance of the store around closing time so everything goes like clockwork. They enter the store while the owner, Kenneth Staton, and his daughter, Suzanne Ware, are preparing to close the store in their usual way by counting the cash register and emptying the jewelry cases and placing them in the safes in the back room.

  “Two men enter, tie them up securely with ropes and gags, and proceed to steal the most expensive items in the store—worth close to one hundred thousand dollars. They are careful not to leave fingerprints or hit any alarms. After grabbing the jewelry, they shoot both victims twice in the head at close range. They do this so there will be no witnesses. Then they steal Suzanne’s jeep, drive across the street to the Safeway parking lot, where one gets out and gets on a Harley-Davidson, and they travel to a local apartment complex and leave the jeep and go back to the Terry Motel across the bridge in Fort Smith, where they’ve been staying. They pack up their stuff, along with the loot they’ve stolen and placed in orange nylon bags, and head back to Rogers.”