Closing Time: A True Story of Robbery and Double Murder Read online

  The men had told her they were passing hot checks and just working their way toward Oklahoma and then Texas. Damon took off his wig, revealing his dyed blond hair, and Pat thought it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen.

  Damon and Pat flirted with each other, and before long Pat invited Damon home with her for the night.

  “I’ve got to be back in the morning by eight,” he’d said after lighting a cigar and puffing on it to get it going. “That’s eight on Wednesday morning.” And then he tossed a ten to Rick.

  Rick waved goodbye and headed to The Branding Iron, a bar he and Damon had visited on their first day in Fort Smith. He liked the atmosphere there.

  At precisely 8:00 the next morning, Damon opened the motel door with his key.

  “Honey, I’m home,” he called to Rick, who woke up at his arrival.

  Damon lit a cigar and smiled real big. “I feel pretty relaxed. Me and that woman screwed our brains out. It’s good to get some strange every once in a while.”

  Rick agreed and lit up a cigarette before heading to the bathroom. For the moment, Rick thought, Chantina was enough for him.

  Damon opened the briefcase he’d carried with him when the two of them rode on Ricky’s motorcycle down from their campground. Damon hummed a country song—“popular in Georgia,” he said—and laid out at the foot of his bed a woman’s brown wig, rope, a .22 revolver, a .38 pistol, a homemade silencer, and two orange nylon duffle bags.

  “Get some washrags from the bathroom,” Damon ordered. “They make good gags. You know, to keep people from screaming.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Suzanne Ware, the youngest of the Staton daughters, sat in front of a fan that was set up on the kitchen cabinet. It was already hot that Wednesday morning on the 10th of September as she laid her diary on the kitchen table. She had started writing in her brand-new journal exactly a year ago. She read to herself how she’d opened:

  Keeping a journal will be a new experience for me. I want to try it, partly for myself and partly for my family in the future. I have enjoyed reading my grandmother’s and my aunt’s diaries, so maybe someday someone will enjoy mine. I do plan to give more than facts. I’ll try to give my thoughts and feelings.

  Instead of writing in her diary, she thought about the coming suppertime her family would spend together at her sister Karen’s new house. Suzanne had seen the house first and told her sister about it. They both agreed it had possibilities. They would be within walking distance from each other, and Karen, handy with a paintbrush and a hammer, wasn’t afraid to tackle any project. She had even figured out how she could cook a spaghetti supper for her family without a kitchen stove.

  Another sister, Elaine, and her little boy, Ben, lived close by and were coming too, and she looked forward to playing with her adorable nephew, who would be two in December. Janet, the sister just a year younger than Karen, lived in Paris, Texas, so she couldn’t be there. Suzanne missed her. It would be sad without her when they all sat down to dinner that night.

  Suzanne wanted to get in a little studying before she showered and dressed for work at the jewelry store. Her clothes for the day, a navy flowered dress and ankle-strapped wedgies, were laid out on the bed she’d made up after she’d kissed her husband, Tom, goodbye.

  He was a musician, and he and his band were playing that night at the Camelot Hotel in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was picked up by his friend, Jimmy Atchison, another guitar player, and they had some last-minute arrangements to make before leaving around four that afternoon. The other members were leaving earlier with the equipment.

  Sometimes she went with him and listened to him play. He sang, wrote songs, and played the guitar, and she’d fallen in love with him in the ninth grade. They had married on January 26th, 1976, when they were both nineteen.

  She lifted her long brown hair off her neck and stood in front of the fan. Even her gold cross necklace she always wore felt hot around her neck.

  Suzanne walked into the bedroom and let her hair fall back down her back. Hair like hers was the style of the ’70s and ’80s, but she wondered how she’d look with short hair. She had a pretty face and dark-brown eyes, like her parents, and she’d been told she had a pretty figure, even if she did only weigh a little over one hundred pounds.

  While her husband dreamed of making it big in the music business, she longed to become a vet, and with that ambitious dream, she’d just begun college courses at Westark Community College in Fort Smith. She planned her class hours around her full-time job at the jewelry store, purposely not scheduling classes on Wednesdays because it was Karen’s day off. It was a good day to get to work with her dad. She was the only daughter who had shown a talent in watch repair, so she worked side by side with him at a long table in the back room.

  Karen pretty much ran the front where the glass display cases were. She was good at arranging gift items and decorating for the different seasons. Karen also ordered the merchandise and patiently and expertly waited on customers. Their mother, always on call, helped when needed, which was most of the time.

  Kenneth Staton had a policy that there would always be two people in the store, especially at closing time. The threat of robbery was always there, of course, and he’d cautioned his family that, if that awful thing were to ever happen, they were to cooperate—that nothing was worth losing their lives. He refused to keep a gun for protection because he said he could never shoot someone.

  Suzanne loved her parents. She and her sisters were close, and they all pitched in as a team to help in the family business. Since their father never complained about his inability to do what other fathers might, they didn’t either. The sisters were aware of their mom’s devotion and hard work, especially when she had worked the night shift at Dixie Cup for four years to pay the bills while their dad was in the hospital for surgery or rehabilitation in Memphis or Hot Springs.

  Suzanne felt lucky. She was surrounded by the love of her family, her husband, and her new family, the Wares.

  Her only complaint on that Wednesday, September 10th, was the heat. The awful, terrible heat. It was just too hot to think about writing in her diary. She’d do it later that night, after she got home from Karen’s.

  —||—

  Ruth Staton moved a little slower than usual that Wednesday morning. She had fixed bacon, scrambled eggs, and made toast for breakfast, and then poured herself an unusual second cup of coffee. Her husband had driven their car to work, so she didn’t have to get dressed as early as usual. She lingered over the coffee and read last week’s The Press Argus, the local weekly where they often advertised. She was pleased that Karen had taken over that aspect of the business. Karen was artistic. She filled the display cases in a pleasing way and decorated the store windows with seasonal flair. She knew the inventory, maybe even better than her dad.

  Ruth’s mom, Juanita Greenfield, lived in the Cavanaugh section of Fort Smith, and she’d insisted Ruth keep her car while she visited another daughter in Oklahoma City. Ruth liked having a second car, even for just a little while. Her mother was really good to her. She and Kenneth had moved in with her family after they had married at a too-young age. Ruth had dreams of becoming a nurse, and Kenneth had told her he’d always wait on her. But they were in love and couldn’t wait, so they married when she was seventeen and he twenty.

  “Ruthie,” he’d told her, “I know my rheumatoid arthritis will probably make me a cripple someday if they don’t find a cure. Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”

  Ruthie had kissed him and said she didn’t care. But she did care. Not for herself, but for her husband. She was used to bad things happening. Her family was poor, like many others during the depression, and she’d almost died of diphtheria when she was a baby. And when she was fourteen, while running from a boy who was trying to kiss her, she’d fallen off a forty-foot cliff, injuring her right leg so badly the doctor had said, “We’ll try to save her life first before we even think about trying to save the leg.”

>   She’d spent four months in the hospital before she could go home, minus her first pair of blue jeans that had to be cut off after her fall.

  But Ruth Staton was strong, and she knew her husband was a good man. A proud man. When he’d showed her an ad in a magazine advertising a watch repair correspondence class, she encouraged him to take it. They didn’t know how they’d get the seventy-five dollar fee together, but they knew the Good Lord would help them. And He did. In fact, Ruth and Kenneth Staton credited God with everything good that ever came their way. They still belonged to Central Presbyterian Church in Fort Smith—one of the churches they’d attended while they lived in Fort Smith—and continued attending there now that they lived in Van Buren on Azure Street.

  She and Kenneth had been married thirty years, and on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she had given him a beautiful diamond wedding band. She also had two pretty rings of her own—a showy cluster diamond ring and a ruby and diamond ring—both befitting the wife of a jewelry store owner.

  Ruth looked at her watch and decided her loafing hour was over. Suzanne would be working with her that day since Wednesday was Karen’s day off, and she knew they had over twenty-some-odd watches and jewelry items waiting to be repaired and made right again. She would be at the store all day until almost closing, when she would leave to return her mother’s car to her since she was getting home from Oklahoma City that night. She hoped Kenneth and Suzanne could get a lot accomplished. Ruth felt good about business. It was always slow during the summer, but lately it had really picked up. Yes, she thought, things were looking good for the Statons.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  At Horseshoe Bend, Chantina and Loralei had walked to the camp showers early that Wednesday morning. They wanted to beat the other campers and get the hot water while it lasted. Chantina liked being close to the lake. It was pretty, almost like being close to an ocean, which she’d never seen before so it didn’t really matter if it was a lake or an ocean. In Topeka, Kansas, it was flat and dry, and the only water she’d ever swum in was at the city pool, and she’d only done that a few times. It cost money, and she didn’t have any.

  She missed Ricky and his Harley. She’d always had a penchant for guys who rode Harleys. And Ricky was good-looking—a couple of inches shy of six feet with dark eyes and dark, wavy hair. They were in the throes of first love or passion or whatever you wanted to call it. She just wished he wasn’t so poor, but she seemed to always fall in love with the poor guys. The good-looking poor guys who rode Harleys.

  Loralei never let her out of sight. It was as if she thought Chantina would leave.

  Think about it, Chantina considered telling her. Where am I going to go, and how will I get to where I’m supposed to be going to?

  Although she and Loralei were about the same age, she felt Damon’s wife was way more worldly than she was. Loralei drank too much, and she bragged in her thick Southern accent that she had drug connections in Cobb County, Georgia, and on Stewart Avenue in Atlanta.

  Chantina wasn’t a Goody Two-Shoes. After all, she was a carnie, but she felt like there was a time and place for getting shit-faced drunk. Loralei started her day that way. And she liked men and wasn’t ashamed of showing off her cute little body, which was about a size four. In that hot weather, Loralei wore cut-off shorts that showed off her butt and halter tops that showed off her tits. Chantina caught Ricky looking at them once, and she told him, if she saw him do it again, she’d tell Damon. Ricky had denied it, but she knew better.

  When Chantina got working again, she was going to dye her hair the color of Loralei’s, a pretty dark brown. She was flat broke now, and there was nothing left for her to do but get along. She sure would be glad when Ricky got back. They’d been gone for three days now, doing something that nobody wanted to talk about, but Ricky told her he’d soon have some cash in his billfold, and she could buy anything she wanted.

  “Be patient,” he’d told her.

  And so she was. As patient as she could be with a crazy alcoholic following her around.

  Loralei was born in Alabama. She’d lived off and on with her maternal grandmother, Sue Brooks, the only parent figure she’d ever known. She smoked her first marijuana cigarette when she was thirteen and then graduated to Quaaludes, cocaine, morphine, and Dilaudid. Her drug of choice was alcohol, though, and she’d spent time off and on in juvenile detention centers before graduating to county jails. She was pretty and could talk her way out of trouble some of the time. Damon wasn’t really her husband. In fact, her real name wasn’t Loralei, and his real name wasn’t Damon. They’d gotten in a little trouble at a campground in Tyrone, Georgia, so they changed their names. Sometimes it was hard to remember.

  The guys would be back that night. And she couldn’t wait to see what Damon would bring her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Cloverleaf Plaza was a nice shopping center that had been developed in the late 1960s by a long-time Van Buren citizen, C.C. Gunn. His nickname was Pistol, for obvious reasons. His son, Johnson, was well known as a handsome athlete of the early ’50s, who drove a red convertible and kept a Bible in his back pocket. His younger sisters, Judy and Jane, were beautiful and exceptional in scholastics and popularity. Anything Pistol Gunn touched turned to gold—even his children. And in the Gunn tradition of excellence, the shopping center was thriving.

  In that hot September of 1980, the shopping center consisted of a drug store, a dress shop, a Hunt’s Department Store, a Walmart, a movie rental place, a sporting goods store, an optical shop, an Otasco store, a laundromat, a radio station, and a small bank. And beyond the parking spaces, across the busy 64-71 highway—four lanes with congested turn lanes—sat Safeway, a large grocery store with a small deli and bakery. And next to it, by some elm trees, another bank.

  It was in that Safeway parking lot that Ricky Anderson parked his motorcycle at the side of the store. He and Damon Peterson had visited a pawn shop in Fort Smith earlier in the day and pawned a ring of Damon’s for forty-five dollars, which they needed to tide them over until the pay day that would come around six o’clock.

  After looking around to see if anyone had seemed to notice them, they hung their helmets over the handlebars. They then went inside the front door to a cold drink machine, and Ricky bought a can of Dr. Pepper and Damon got a root beer. Each looked at the clock above the door as they walked out.

  5:45.

  Back in the parking lot, Ricky took a long drink and commented on the heat coming off the asphalt while Damon opened the saddlebag on the back of the motorcycle and pulled out a briefcase. He looked around, but he didn’t see anyone close by. He handed a .38 revolver wrapped in a Walmart sack to Ricky and stuck a .22 pistol in his jeans and pulled his shirt down over it.

  With the briefcase under his left arm and the root beer in his right hand, he jerked his head toward the Cloverleaf Shopping Center across the street.

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ruth Staton grabbed her purse and said a quick goodbye to her husband and daughter around 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the 10th of September. She saw the look on Suzanne’s face that said Mother, you’re leaving early?

  “Remember? I’ve got to take Nanny’s car home to her.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot. See you later at Karen’s.”

  On the way out, Ruth spoke to a teenage girl who was looking at rings through the glass case.

  “I’m sorry I can’t wait on you. Suzy will be with you in just a minute.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, Mrs. Staton. I’m just killing time while my mom’s in Walmart. I’m looking at birthstone rings. My eighteenth birthday is October fifth.”

  “Oh, Brenda, I didn’t recognize you at first. Your hair has gotten really long. Well, you tell your mom I said hello.”

  On the drive to her mother’s home on the south side of Fort Smith, Ruth thought about Brenda’s mother, who had just started a new job as a checker for Safeway in Fort Smith. Her husband was home, out of w
ork, because he’d fallen off a ladder while he was nailing down some loose shingles. He’d broken his right arm and right leg and would be off work for a long time.

  In earlier years of her marriage, Ruth had once worked as a checker for Safeway, so she knew how hard that job was. The pay was okay, but she was pretty sure there wouldn’t be enough money for a ring for Brenda. If Kenneth found out that Brenda wanted the ring so badly, he’d probably help her family make some payment plan. He was much more tender-hearted than she was.

  The traffic on Interstate 540 was bad, so she decided she’d better pay closer attention to the road. She passed the exits for Rogers Avenue, Greenwood Avenue, Zero Street, Highway 71, and then, at Exit 13, she headed down busy Jenny Lind to Cavanaugh Road.

  She parked her mom’s car in the garage and went inside her house, where she found the plants watered and the blinds opened. Her mom’s next-door neighbor had been there to get her house in order. The house was warm, but Ruth didn’t dare turn the air down. Her mother was very particular.

  Ruth walked through the house, making sure everything was as it should be, and then she walked into the living room and stood at the big picture window. From that view, she could watch for Kenneth, who would be arriving soon to pick her up so they could get back to Karen’s house for supper.

  Karen had purchased an older home she was remodeling, and the kitchen stove had been removed. Since Wednesday was her day off, she had invited her entire family for supper, even though she had to use a crock pot to fix the spaghetti.

  Ruth was proud of Karen, as well as her other daughters. They had never caused their parents any trouble, as many teenage girls are prone to do, and now they had grown up to be responsible adults. Two of them had made her a grandmother.