I ain’t no bullshitter, okay? I ain’t got nothin’ to gain from this except helping my kid. There’s no way I can testify to nothin’.”
“When Furrow told you this, did he say how they disposed of the body?”
“Furrow said it was Clarence,” she explained. “See, I do illegal things but I don’t ask questions. People talk but I don’t say nothin’; people just tell me things. I might say ‘what the fuck you do that for?’ But I don’t ask because I don’t want to know. But Allen told me they dumped her in a creek high in the mountains. They rolled her up in a blanket and I guess put some wires around it and weights and dumped her in a creek in the mountains. But I don’t know where.”
No matter how the two investigators tried to discover something about the location of the creek, Carrasco couldn’t come up with it. She added only that some of Allen’s men went with him to dump the body. “I don’t think Eugene went, but I’m not sure. I do know that one of the guys who went was a guy who had a missing tooth. I had met him before, but I didn’t talk to him.”
Blade looked down at his notes. “I know we’re going to have more questions, but for now we’re just starting.”
“Yeah, well you got a long ways to go on this and I ain’t got a whole lot more to tell you. But, I can give you one more thing. Eugene Furrow’s feelin’ real bad about this. This was two years ago and the conscience, well, the conscience is a hell of a thing, honey, and I don’t think there’s a soul born without it. Except, maybe, that isn’t true for Clarence. Hell, I don’t know. Anyway, I think Eugene will crack real easy. You get him and you’ll get the whole story.”
Blade’s mouth pulled back into a knowing smile. “So Eugene isn’t the hardened criminal type?”
“Nah, he said he couldn’t sleep. He said when he went to sleep he could see her eyes open and staring at him and he couldn’t get over her eyes looking at him when he was doin’ it and he probably never would. I told him, ‘What’s done is done. There ain’t nothing I can do for you, all the talking in the world ain’t goin’ to change anything. Either you go tell the police or you gotta live with your conscience. You live with it or you do something and try and make it right.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know how I’m ever gonna live with it.’ And I told him, ‘Then you’ve got to do something about it, don’t you?’ So, I guess he never did nothin’—learned to live with it, I guess. But Eugene ain’t like Clarence. Eugene may have done it but Clarence is the one. He’s the one that made him do it. I don’t think Eugene would ever do that on his own. He was just like me. I mean I break the law sometimes, but I don’t kill people. Guys like Clarence are different.”
“Barbara, is there anything else you can remember right now that we need to know?” Lean asked as he reached for the tape recorder
“Well, you get him. I can’t help you much with testifyin’ and such. I’m an ex-convict, baby. Well, I guess I’m not an ex-convict yet, ’cause I’m still here, right?” She added with a chortle. “Anyway you look at it, somebody’s going to be calling me a liar. I haven’t talked before to buy myself time, so this is the first time with you guys. Make sure you keep me out of it or I’ll have Clarence Ray Allen on me. I know him and you don’t fuck with him. You got to put him in jail for good on this. He shouldn’t have messed with my kid. If he hadn’t of done that, I wouldn’t be talkin’ to you now. Nothin’ personal, you understand, but you guys never did me no good. Hey, maybe you can get me transferred back to Terminal Island in California. I would be closer to my family. Maybe you can do that?”
Blade turned off the tape. “We’ll see what we can do.”
They waited for Carrasco to rise. Lean walked to the door and knocked for the guard. “We’re done.”
Blade stuck out his hand. “Thanks for talking to us, Barbara.”
Barbara Carrasco stood there for a moment and extended her hand. “Just remember, you take Allen down and you leave me out of it. You don’t know him like I do.”
“We understand.” Blade and Tommy waited until the guard walked Barbara Carrasco out the door. She didn’t look back. She had done what she had set out to do. What they had to decide was whether what she said was true or whether she was just trying to bury Allen in a pile of bullshit. Both men had questioned a lot of people, some hard types and some just regular folks. You get a feel for when it’s bullshit and when it’s true and even when it’s somewhere in between. As they walked out the doors of Alderson Federal Penitentiary, they were sure that Clarence Allen was guilty of murder, and that he did it by making someone else do it. They also knew that at least one man was so terrified of Allen that he had been willing to kill a woman for him. There was no question; Clarence Allen wasn’t the kind of man who would crack. They had to take him down. To do that, they had to make others crack.
Blade was one of the old breed. It was time to hunt down Clarence Ray Allen. And Blade knew well that the sometimes it takes a wolf to hunt down a wolf.
7
You Don’t Break a Horse in One Ride
December 17, 1976
Alderson Women’s Prison
Alderson, West Virginia
A murder case takes on a life of its own. People may think that they understand the process, but they really don’t. They think that because they’ve seen some television detective wrap up a murder investigation in an hour, they know how it’s done. But life isn’t like television. Most of the success in solving a murder or in catching a murderer comes as a result of plain sweat and hard work. You know that murder always has a pattern—you just have to find it.
Assuming you have a suspicion, and even some evidence about who the murderer might be, it doesn’t mean that you can prove it. Every detective knows that you can bring a stack of paper to the district attorney and tell him or her that you have a case, but that doesn’t mean you have a case; all it means is you have a big stack of paper. All a detective needs in order to make an arrest is a strong suspicion and an arrest warrant. But a conviction of murder requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. And that means evidence, lots of evidence.
Barbara Carrasco was right about her information; it was hearsay and couldn’t be used in court against Allen unless the person testifying had actually heard him say it—and without more, it wasn’t enough to prove murder. First, there was no body. Without a body, it’s very hard to prove a murder has been committed. In most murder cases, the body is the best evidence. Without a body, a pathologist can’t determine, and certainly can’t prove, cause of death. Without a body, you need an eyewitness to prove there ever was a body. Without a body, you can’t find physical evidence at the crime scene because you don’t have a crime scene. So, without a body, only in the rarest of instances can you prove murder.
Blade and Lean knew that without a body, whatever Barbara Carrasco said wouldn’t mean much. They had to have more. In the arcane world of evidence, it also meant that only what Eugene Furrow said about himself could be used against Eugene Furrow and only what Clarence Allen said about himself could be used against him. All Furrow or Allen had to say was that Barbara Carrasco was lying when she testified about what either of them supposedly told her, and then what? After all, who were you going to believe? Certainly, Carrasco had a motive to lie. She hated Clarence Ray Allen for what she believed he had done to her son. And Barbara Carrasco was a proven liar; she admitted
