Read Online Bitter Blood by Jerry Bledsoe - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jerry Bledsoe
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when his father was sheriff, three boys he knew died when their car ran under a logging truck, leaving their bodies so mutilated that they were carried away in parts. Only after the bodies were reassembled at a hospital was it realized that a part was missing. Davidson was present when somebody brought his friend’s head into the sheriff’s department in a bushel basket.
In the eight years he spent as a trooper, Davidson investigated so many bloody accidents that only the worst remained seared in his memory: the bodies of five teenage boys crumpled in a creek after their car left the road at high speed and overturned; a head-on crash on a blind curve that killed nine people, leaving only the crying of a single bloodied little girl to break the eerie silence of the aftermath.
Troopers also worked criminal cases—thefts, robberies, fights, murders—and that was what appealed to Davidson. By his second year on the job he had become the most famous trooper in the district to at least one segment of the population—the moonshiners and bootleggers. He loved catching moonshiners at their stills and stopping bootleggers’ cars heavy with their illicit loads. His father, too, had been a big still hunter, credited with busting 290 stills in his four years as sheriff. “I kinda picked that up, actually, from him,” Davidson admitted, acknowledging that he attempted to break his father’s record.
“I was really on a tear. I was on a crusade. Those guys were smart. It really presented a challenge to catch ’em, just like catching a big bass.”
His fervor was such that the bootleggers organized and put a $15,000 bounty on his head, but a plan to kill him by calling him to a fake accident was foiled when officers got a tip about the setup. Davidson didn’t let the threat stop him.
“I don’t guess I had enough damn sense to worry that much about it,” he said.
The bootlegging and moonshining had much to do with the violence with which Davidson had to deal. “Friday and Saturday night, Sunday afternoons, especially in summertime, it’d get up in the nineties, and they’d go to drinkin’ that moonshine and it started workin’ on ’em. Everybody’d get mad at everybody else. You could just about predict when you’d get a killing. It’d be hot and muggy. You’d be riding around saying ‘Well it won’t be long and we’ll get a call’ and sure enough…”
Most of the killings came in moments of passion brought on by love triangles or disputes of one kind or another—“Harlan County justice”—and were no challenge to investigative skills. Occasionally, a case of another type cropped up—such as the librarian found stabbed sixty-eight times. She had one butcher knife protruding from an eye, another from her throat. Davidson spent nearly a year tracing that to a mental patient who once lived in the victim’s neighborhood. The killer claimed that the Lord had directed her to send the librarian home to heaven. And there was the case of the storekeeper on Jones Creek, near Verda, who had been bound, wrapped in a curtain, and left to suffocate after a robbery in 1961—the case on which Davidson had spent the most effort of his career, earning for him only frustration.
By 1969 Davidson had given up his trooper’s uniform to devote himself completely to criminal cases as a detective. Two years later, in January 1971, he was promoted to detective sergeant and transferred across the state to Post Five at La Grange in Oldham County. By then he was separated from his wife and two children (a son, Daniel Keith, was born in 1962), and he looked at the move as a chance to start anew. In September of that year, as soon as his divorce was final, he married a receptionist he’d met at Harlan Hospital. He and his new wife, Karen, moved into a trailer on the Oldham County Fairgrounds, next to the state police post, and Davidson built horseshoe pits in one of the exhibition buildings. Karen worked for a while at the
In the eight years he spent as a trooper, Davidson investigated so many bloody accidents that only the worst remained seared in his memory: the bodies of five teenage boys crumpled in a creek after their car left the road at high speed and overturned; a head-on crash on a blind curve that killed nine people, leaving only the crying of a single bloodied little girl to break the eerie silence of the aftermath.
Troopers also worked criminal cases—thefts, robberies, fights, murders—and that was what appealed to Davidson. By his second year on the job he had become the most famous trooper in the district to at least one segment of the population—the moonshiners and bootleggers. He loved catching moonshiners at their stills and stopping bootleggers’ cars heavy with their illicit loads. His father, too, had been a big still hunter, credited with busting 290 stills in his four years as sheriff. “I kinda picked that up, actually, from him,” Davidson admitted, acknowledging that he attempted to break his father’s record.
“I was really on a tear. I was on a crusade. Those guys were smart. It really presented a challenge to catch ’em, just like catching a big bass.”
His fervor was such that the bootleggers organized and put a $15,000 bounty on his head, but a plan to kill him by calling him to a fake accident was foiled when officers got a tip about the setup. Davidson didn’t let the threat stop him.
“I don’t guess I had enough damn sense to worry that much about it,” he said.
The bootlegging and moonshining had much to do with the violence with which Davidson had to deal. “Friday and Saturday night, Sunday afternoons, especially in summertime, it’d get up in the nineties, and they’d go to drinkin’ that moonshine and it started workin’ on ’em. Everybody’d get mad at everybody else. You could just about predict when you’d get a killing. It’d be hot and muggy. You’d be riding around saying ‘Well it won’t be long and we’ll get a call’ and sure enough…”
Most of the killings came in moments of passion brought on by love triangles or disputes of one kind or another—“Harlan County justice”—and were no challenge to investigative skills. Occasionally, a case of another type cropped up—such as the librarian found stabbed sixty-eight times. She had one butcher knife protruding from an eye, another from her throat. Davidson spent nearly a year tracing that to a mental patient who once lived in the victim’s neighborhood. The killer claimed that the Lord had directed her to send the librarian home to heaven. And there was the case of the storekeeper on Jones Creek, near Verda, who had been bound, wrapped in a curtain, and left to suffocate after a robbery in 1961—the case on which Davidson had spent the most effort of his career, earning for him only frustration.
By 1969 Davidson had given up his trooper’s uniform to devote himself completely to criminal cases as a detective. Two years later, in January 1971, he was promoted to detective sergeant and transferred across the state to Post Five at La Grange in Oldham County. By then he was separated from his wife and two children (a son, Daniel Keith, was born in 1962), and he looked at the move as a chance to start anew. In September of that year, as soon as his divorce was final, he married a receptionist he’d met at Harlan Hospital. He and his new wife, Karen, moved into a trailer on the Oldham County Fairgrounds, next to the state police post, and Davidson built horseshoe pits in one of the exhibition buildings. Karen worked for a while at the
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