Blood Games. A True Account of Family Murder

588 Pages·2014·5.4 MB·English

by  Jerry Bledsoe

Blood Games
A True Account of Family Murder
Jerry Bledsoe
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1991 by Jerry Bledsoe
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition May 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-287-1
More from Jerry Bledsoe
Before He Wakes
Bitter Blood
Death Sentence
For Greta
Names of some minor characters have been changed and some
identifying characteristics slightly altered to protect privacy. Names
changed are indicated with an asterisk on first use.
I SEEK A FATHER WHO MOST NEEDS A SON.
— JOHN MALCOLM BRINNIN
Preface
The hogs never showed alarm, no sense of their awful and imminent
fate. If they had, Noel Lee wasn’t sure that he would have been able to
raise them. He had been a hog farmer for just two years, a small-time
operator raising only five hundred at a time, a sideline to the nine
hundred acres of tobacco, peanuts, corn, and soybeans that supplied
his main income.
The hogs actually weren’t his. They belonged to a contractor, W. L.
Murphy, who ran the biggest hog operation on the East Coast.
Murphy supplied pigs, feed, and medicine to Noel Lee, and he simply
provided a place and care for the pigs to grow. They came to him ten
weeks old, weighing about forty pounds each. Sixteen weeks later,
they weighed six times that much and were ready for market.
Lee had mixed feelings when that time came. He looked forward
to being paid for his work, but felt a sadness about it, too. Hogs were
friendly and intelligent, he had discovered, and despite his best
intentions to the contrary, he grew close to them in the four months
that he tended them. They recognized him and sometimes came up
to him seeking affection, not unlike a dog, making it harder to send
them off to the packing house when the time came.
That always took place in the middle of the night. Hogs were
easier to handle when they were still drowsy with sleep. What’s more,
in the hot Carolina summer, moving hogs at night was imperative.
Hogs can’t survive long in heat. Even in the coolness of night they had
to be sprayed with water while being moved to keep them from
overheating and dying.
That was the primary reason that loading times ranged from
midnight to 6:00 A.M., the coolest hours of the day, and on the
twenty-fifth of July, 1988, Lee drew a four o’clock loadout, as the
operation was called. He was up after only a few hours’ sleep, and at
three-fifteen, he climbed into his gray Chevrolet pickup and headed
for his hog house, just a short distance up Grimesland Bridge Road
from his large brick house on the eastern edge of Pitt County.
Situated on a sandy lane well back from the road, the hog house was
long and low, with a corrugated metal roof and canvas sides that
remained open in summer to provide air circulation. When Lee
arrived, he was surprised to see the lights on, the big truck with its
railed, double-decker trailer already backed up to the wooden loading
chute at the rear.
Newton Carter, head of the three-man loadout crew, was already
in the pens, marking the backs of the biggest hogs with a fat orange
crayon. Only the biggest, most aggressive hogs would be taken. The
others, more timid at the feeding troughs, would be left to fatten for
another week or so.
“I’m glad to see y’all early,” Lee said. “Might get some sleep
tonight.”
Loading hogs was hard and smelly work. The stench permeated
clothing after only a few minutes and was powerful enough to set
sensitive stomachs aboil, but loadout crews were accustomed to it.
After the biggest hogs were marked, Lee and the two crew
members went into the pens carrying heavy plywood boards with
handholds cut into the top. These cutting boards, as they are called,
were used to isolate and direct the selected hogs to the gates of the
pens and into the aisle, where Newton Carter encouraged the
reluctant toward the chute and into the trailer with a battery-
operated electric prod. The hogs were disgruntled and confused at
being rousted from sleep, and the loadout always proceeded with
much recalcitrance and squealing on their part and much scrambling
and yelling from the men. This night, however, it went more smoothly
than usual, and by four the job was done, the men sweat-drenched
and dung-besmeared, the hogs snorting and squirming in the close
confines of the trailer, cooled by automatic sprinklers. By mid-
morning, the hogs would be hanging by their rear legs, eviscerated,
soon to be rendered into bacon, pork chops, ham, and sausage.
The truck driver, taking no chances on losing any of his crowded
passengers to the heat, left immediately with his load, but the crew
lingered for a while, chatting with Lee, discussing the next loadout.
“Well, see you next week,” Lee said, as the crew made ready to
depart. After they left, he returned to check the automatic feeders, to
make sure the pens were secure and to shut off the lights.
Ten minutes later, he was back in his truck heading home, eager
for a shower. But as he neared the road, he saw an orange glow
against the trees to the north, perhaps half a mile away. His first
thought was that a neighbor’s trailer home might be ablaze, but then
he saw that the fire was too near the road to be the trailer. A wreck,
he thought. There’d been wrecks in that curve before. Perhaps
somebody was trapped in a burning vehicle.
Lee had been a volunteer fireman and rescue squad member for
more than twenty years, and he turned instinctively toward the blaze,
his foot pressing hard on the gas pedal. Up closer, he saw that the fire
was not from a wreck either. It was about eight feet off the road,
beside a path that led through the trees to an old black cemetery,
overgrown and never visited anymore. A small pile of something was
burning, the flames blue at the base and leaping straight into the air,