The Drifter
by
John Crawley
Raymond Leech was the undertaker in our hometown. Fine man. Had him a fine wife, Elsie, I think her name was. They had two children, Martin and Denise. Both went off to school in Oklahoma and I never did see them after that. Martin got himself a scholarship to OU in geology and Denise went to OSU and got a degree in secondary education. That’s about all I know about their kids.
Now what made Raymond Leech so interesting is that he had been in both World Wars. As a child, his family left Holland to escape the fighting and then when Hitler and the Nazis came along, he enlisted in Atlanta, Georgia and joined the army and was shipped out to the Pacific to fight the Empire of Mr. Hirohito.
He was hit by a sniper’s bullet on some far away island and was returned to Honolulu where he recuperated and while there, met Elsie, who was a nurse. They got married about seven days after the big bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and about a year later, Martin was dropped. Six years after that eventful day, Denise came kicking and screaming into the world. I hear she has never shut up since then.
Raymond Leech ran a very successful business. He was a Rotarian. Sat on the school board and was a deacon in Elder Springs Baptist Church. He even sang in the choir up until the day he killed Mabel Forrester, the high school English teacher he had been having an affair with for eleven years.
Nobody in our town knew it was going on. Nobody. My dad ran a car lot and knew almost everyone in the small city. My mom was in the garden club. They had never heard a word about the affair and not until Raymond was arrested, then arraigned for Miss Forrester’s murder, did any of us know that the nefarious act was going on right beneath our collective noses. Well, one person did. And I’m getting to that.
Earl Battle, the school board president wanted to immediately hold a special election to find someone to take Raymond’s seat, but the school’s lawyer, Ted Watson, said that a man was innocent until proven guilty and the school might want to hold off before acting too hastily. The local newspaper headlines read : LOCAL SCHOOL BOARD MEMBER KILLS ENGLISH TEACHER. For a lot of people, that was the trial. Right then and right there. But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at first we didn’t know Raymond was the culprit.
Her body, Miss Forrester’s – I’m talking about– was found in the weeds over by the high school baseball field. She had been stabbed seventeen times with a kitchen knife. The police said a kitchen knife, because the cuts were deep and had been made with a serrated, tooth edge, like a bread knife or steak knife. They never did find the weapon. And for the longest time they didn’t have any leads on the murderer.
Then one afternoon, it was late in the spring semester, police cars came screaming up to the high school and officers came charging down the hall and took Randal Lee Hopkins away with his hands cuffed behind him just like in the movies. We all strained to see what was going on in the parking lot. I was in Miss Loomis’ Spanish class, and we had a student teacher that semester named Harold Weisnehoover. He was a Yankee from New York , who had gone to school over in Fort Worth at TCU and was doing his student teaching at our school. He had little to no control over our class, so of course, we all raced to the windows which were wide open, because my hometown refused to pass a bond issue to air condition the public schools. They weren’t air conditioned until well up into the 1980’s when over three hundred kids had left the city’s schools to go to a new private school, which had modern facilities, including a year-round, indoor swimming pool and air conditioning. It even had an elevator for kids in wheel chairs and old folks. The school board decided to update our schools at that time and got behind a real bond election and passed it and raised the taxes of everybody just so they wouldn’t lose anymore kids from hot classes. My granddad used to joke, that the “Niggers didn’t run nobody out of the schools, but the goddamn hot air sure as hell did.” I told him we didn’t call them that anymore – “We don’t use the N-word, PawPaw; but he snorted and said, ‘They knowd who they is.’”
Anyway, the police was putting this kid named Randal Lee Hopkins into the back of a squad car, red lights blazing on and off. One officer grabbed the top of Randall Lee’s head as he ducked down to get in the back seat. The three police cars sped off and were gone as fast as they had arrived. The buzz in the hallway after that sounded like a chainsaw eating away at a loblolly pine tree. Almost everyone thought that they had come and arrested Randal Lee for the murder of Miss Forrester. Myself included.
I couldn’t image taking anyone’s life with a kitchen knife – stabbing her seventeen times. Over and over and over. Jesus, that was gruesome. Cindy Mayfield was my girlfriend that year. We were juniors. She had dated Randal Lee the year before. To say she was freaked out about it was an understatement. “He could have killed me, Bennett,” she said with tears running down her freckled cheeks. “It could have been me out there at Pioneer Field.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t baby. It wasn’t. It was someone else, so pull yourself together.”
She slapped me. “Don’t you get it? It could have been me. And you don’t care. I dated that killer and it could have been me he killed instead of Miss Forrester. I knew there was something weird about him. You know what he did once? He came over to my house late on a Thursday night. He said he wanted to watch me undress in the window.”
“And?”
She slapped me again. “You know damn well I’m not that kind of girl. At least I hope you know that.”
“So what’s your point?”
“He wanted to see me naked.” I had to admit I had wanted the same thing, but I had never thought to ask so blatantly as Randal Lee must have done. But if Cindy had a story, so too did every other person in high school. By the time the weekend was over and we were back at school, Randal Lee had killed at least ten people with his bare hands in front of unnamed friends of classmates of mine. He had shot young children and crippled their mothers and slit the throats of at least three missing fathers, although later we discovered that one of the father rumored to have died at his hands was actually working off shore in the Gulf on an oilrig. But the point is, we were sure Randal Lee Hopkins was the killer.
I mean all you had to do was look at the Hopkins clan. They were dirty and poorly educated. No one had ever made it out of high school. The old man was a drunk and something of a notorious gambler. He was away from their small shack of a home as much as he was there. And Randal Lee’s mother was believed to run a house of ill repute near the small town of Sabine, Texas, although my friends on the police department said that was a total fabrication. She did have a bar of sorts, but it was always run respectful of the law. But still, a family with that kind of notoriety in our small town and you could see why, with the police coming and barging in to our school in the middle of fourth period, that we just knew Randal Lee was the person who had cut Miss Forrester to pieces and left her in the weeds at Pioneer Field.
“Why’d you date that scum?” I asked Cindy, but she never did answer me. She just kind of pouted like it was none of my damn business.
Truth of the matter was, that Randall Lee had nothing whatsoever to do with killing Miss Forrester. But he did tell a teacher he thought he knew who did.
That teacher, I believe it was Mrs. Harmwell, called the principal, David Griffin, who used to be the football coach at the school. David’s teams won three state championships. Three mind you. The man could have run for mayor or even governor and won. He walked on water in these parts, I swear to you he did. He got offers from Longview and even from colleges in East Texas, but he wanted to stay at a local school and work with kids, so he took over the principal’s chair when old man Fields died one summer on a fishing trip to Arkansas.
Mrs. Harmwell, who actually lived, as did several of our teaching faculty, in Henderson, called the principal and told him that Randall Lee might know something of the death of Miss Forrester. Griffin wasted no time in calling the police and they were at the school in minutes. (Not that our town was big or anything and the police station was only a few blocks away, but still, they got to our campus in no time, handcuffed Randall Lee and drug his butt off.) I thought that would be the last we ever saw of that scrawny ass sophomore.
But on Tuesday he was back in class. Didn’t say a word to a soul. Not a good morning. Not a how are you? Not a ‘you got a cigarette or some grass or kiss my butt.’ Nothing. First period he just sat there in sociology and stayed real quiet.
Everybody was taking a peek at him and some of the girls even giggled. He didn’t pay them no mind. He was a Hopkins and he had been in and out of trouble before and killing an English teacher, from all the rumors we had been listening to since Friday, was no big thing for him. I guarantee you, nobody walked by him in the hallway without looking around. And you didn’t want to find yourself in the restroom with him alone. You never knew if you might be next on his list.
But on Wednesday we all knew why he wasn’t behind bars. The police had been directed to the Leach Funeral Home and Mortuary, where they found their man. You talk about a town that was in shock. Oh my God. Everyone was flabbergasted when they read the story in the Independent Voice, our local afternoon newspaper. In those days it came out every afternoon and on Sunday mornings. Today it publishes once a week and then not on holiday weeks.
The story broke that an unnamed source had seen the couple on several occasions and knew of the illicit love affair and had known of a fight the two had just two days before Miss Forrester disappeared. Some of us guessed that the unnamed source was Randall Lee. Cindy said he was probably sneaking around looking in Miss Forrester’s windows and saw her naked and kept going back and soon saw Mr. Leech lying there naked on top of her doing his thing with her. I told Cindy her imagination was running a bit wild with her and she should rein it in. She slapped me. “You never believe anything I tell you. He was squatted outside my window waiting for me to get naked, I don’t see why he couldn’t have done the same with Miss Forrester.”
But the newspaper said the unnamed source told police that Forrester and Leech had been having a fight about Mr. Leech not breaking the news to his wife. Now remember this affair had apparently gone on for eleven years. Not that anybody knew that at this time, that came out in the trial. But still, they had had words and even some physical shoving and pushing and Leech had told Miss Forrester that if she kept this up he was going to have to break off their tryst and return all of his affection back to his wife. Her name was Eloise, now that I think about it. That’s right.
The police took Raymond Leech into custody and immediately moved him to Longview our county seat. He was safer there in their modern jail. It was air conditioned, too. Our jail, like the school at that time, wasn’t blessed with refrigerated air. A Federal Court ruling in about 1989 forced them to add AC to the jail. Some inmate, probably one of my high school buddies in the drunk tank, sued the city for unusual punishment and won and the city had to get air conditioning for the jailhouse.
Raymond Leech’s trial was the sensation of the day. Hundreds of people were called as potential jurors, but hell, everybody knew the Leeches and they were good folks. So the judge in Longview decided a change of venue was necessary for Raymond to get a fair trial from impartial jurors. They moved his trial to Beaumont, Texas. There in that Gulf-side port town, a jury of twelve citizens of the Lone Star State found Mr. Leech guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to die in the electric chair in Huntsville.
All through the trial he made no excuses for the affair. He never denied it. Not for one second. He sat on that witness chair, tears flowing down his puffy cheeks and told the world that he was guilty of the sin of lust and fornicating with another woman outside the bonds of his marriage. He said he had craved her since the first time he laid eyes on her in Joe Holloway’s Piggly Wiggly store. And that he had fallen from grace by having an affair with Mable Ruth Forrester for eleven years. The newspaper said when he uttered the words ‘eleven years’ a murmur ran across the courtroom then a collected gasp that broke out into a full onslaught of noise. The judge had to bang the gavel down two or three times hard to quiet the crowd that had traveled the two hundred miles by chartered bus. Trailways said it was the biggest thing since taken the crowd of Pioneer fans to Austin for the state championship games.
Eleven years. Longer than a decade he had been going to her house and lying on top of her and having his way inside her and nobody in our town, except Randall Lee knew a thing of it.
They called Randall Lee to the stand, too. Oh boy did they. He was grilled for two days straight. Had trouble right at first because he was supposed to lay his hand on the Bible and swear that he was going to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help him God. And Randall Lee said he couldn’t swear on a Bible ‘cause he was Pentecostal and all and that they didn’t believe in taking an oath in the name of God with their hands on the Good Book. The judge took the matter under advisement and after a quick recess, where he discussed it with the two sets of lawyers, he came back into court and told Randall Lee that he wanted him to tell the truth and to promise him, the judge, he would. And Randall Lee said, “Yes sir. I sure will.” And so his two days in the hot seat began.
But his story was pretty straightforward. We all knew by now that he was the unnamed source the police talked about in the Independent Voice. We all knew that he had spied on Miss Forrester and had for some time seen Mr. Leech having his way with her. He told the evening they had had their first fight. At least the first he had witnessed. Then with each successive night he said the fights got worse and before you knew it, Mr. Leech and Miss Forrester were actually coming to blows.
Then a few days went by and nothing happened. And then the police found Miss Forrester all cut up and naked over at the baseball field and, well now you got the whole story just like we did.
And the jury got it too and they sent Raymond Leech to Huntsville, to the Department of Corrections in the State of Texas to be electrocuted in old Sparky. They still used the wooden electric chair in those days. The Federal busy bodies hadn’t gotten involved in making a death row final act something pleasant and peaceful, yet. It was still the old fashion way. They burned you from the inside out.
I’m told your organs fry inside your body and your blood boils and your eyes pop out of their sockets. It sounds rather gruesome.
On December 19th, 1992, they took Raymond Leech, who had tried every possible way to get his sentence overturned and his conviction reviewed – they took him and ran about a gazillion watts of electricity through his body and he died. He had been on death row for seventeen years.
He was returned to our hometown and irony of ironies, he was deposited at the old funeral home he used to own. It was now owned by a family whose name was Guthrie and had moved there from Louisiana. They had run funeral homes all across the South, for several generations, but Mr. Guthrie said it was the first time he ever prepared and buried a convicted murderer who had died in the electric chair. To say the least, it was a closed casket service.
About two years ago I read a story in the Los Angeles Times about a prisoner in Texas who confessed to a series of gruesome killings. He was a drifter with a Mexican name. Lopez or Gonzales or something. He would ride the rails and find unsuspecting women and torture them and kill them in their own homes with their own kitchen knives.
The police in my hometown didn’t want to reopen the story of Raymond Leech, but a public outcry forced the District Attorney to take a look and see; and sure enough, the Mexican drifter riding the rails had killed a school teacher in our town about the time Miss Forrester went missing.
They asked the man how he picked his victims and he said it varied, but in our town, he followed a high school kid to a house where he watched the kid as he squatted and performed a ritual with himself while watching the woman of the house get naked and have sex with an older gentleman. The drifter said he didn’t do anything about it that visit, but six weeks later he rode the KATY freight line back through town and hopped off and made his way to the woman’s house. When he was sure no one was around, he went inside and took her life. “How?” Asked the D.A.
“If she was the one I am remembering,” he said, “I stabbed her a bunch with her own kitchen knife. There were a lot of them. But that one I remember as being real hard to bring down. I had to stab her a lot.”
“What did you do with it – the knife? We’ve never been able to find a murder weapon?”
“You’d have to ask that kid. I looked up and he was there in the window staring wide eyed at me. So I went out and he was frozen in place. Scart like a rabbit. Like a deer with its eyes caught in the headlights. I handed him the knife and a twenty dollar bill and said, “You get rid of this and forget you ever saw me. You hear?’ He nodded, took the knife and ran off. I put the body in her own car, drove it out to some dark field, and pulled the pieces out of the trunk and left her there. I ain’t never been back to your town, till today.”
That drifter is still in prison from what I hear. Still confessing to a bunch of unsolved murders up and down the southwest and along the railroad lines. He knew details about murders that only the police investigators knew, so they had a pretty good idea he was legit. I never knew what happened to Randall Lee Hopkins. But Cindy was probably right for slapping me for not taking him or her seriously.
Eloise got remarried about six years after her husband’s death. She always maintained he might have had an affair, but he could never kill anyone. But no one was listening.
I left town and moved to California. I had forgotten all about all this until I saw Cindy’s picture on Facebook. She is still as pretty as she ever was – freckles and all. I got out my old yearbook and there was a picture of Cindy and me at the homecoming dance. And a picture of Miss Forrester and on the administration page a picture of Mr. Leech with the rest of the school board. There was even an ad in the back from his funeral home. There wasn’t a picture of Randall Lee that year. Just a blank square, which said, Student Absent.
I kinda don’t remember what he looks like. You forget after a long time.
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