Murder-Murder

By John White

In the late 1980s, when several people in southern Tennessee began to disappear they seemed to have one thing in common, they all were last seen with the Bondurant brothers. When investigators finally pieced together the murder cases surrounding the twin brothers they discovered a horrifying spree of incinerated bodies, mistaken vengeance, and accusations of cannibalism committed with a casualness in homicide that made the most seasoned detective's blood run cold. The Bondurant brothers series of murders forged a legend mingled with fact and myth that thrives to this day in the rolling hills of Tennessee where the scattered remains of their victims still are largely undiscovered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John White
• Release date: Jan 21, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301289011

John White

Retired Assoc. Professor of Criminal Justice, Martin Methodist College, Pulaski, TN Retired police officer, 30 yr.s service Ph. D. in Public Administration, Tennessee State University Co-founder of the Tennessee Law Enforcement Training Officers Assoc.

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Murder-Murder

By: John L. White, Ph. D.

Copyright 2013 John L. White

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Murders

Bond and Discovery Hearing

The Dugger Trial

The Gaines Trial

The Aftermath

Conclusion

Author's Notes

Acknowledgements

References

Photos

Introduction

The concept of free will, the basis upon which western juris prudence is founded, holds that human action is born out of reason, that deeds are the product of motive. In western culture, why human beings do what they do has been the focus of extraordinary intellectual enterprise since time out of mind. But never has so much effort been given to the discovery of human motive than in the area of the exploration connected with the machinations of the criminal mind. From the inception of Judeo-Christian religious principles, why Cain slew Able, to the philosophical debates of Nineteenth Century classical criminology, the argument over free will, and its associated legal principle, mens rea, western man has been obsessed with the workings of the criminal mind.

The last half of the Twentieth Century alone witnessed an explosion of theories dedicated to explaining why people committed the despicable acts they were held to account for. The era saw the development of every causal explanation from comical conceptions to intriguing possibilities as explanation for criminal conduct. The age saw the advent of theories based upon a host of divergent causal theories; Anomie, alienation, sociological, physiological, psychological, cultural, and environmental factors. Some theories were thought provoking, such as Sutherland’s theory of learned criminal conduct, better known as differential association, while a host of others theories flourished of far less substance, such as nutritionally based theories, the most famous of these was the idea that the intake of high caloric foods could product deviant behavior; the Twinkie defense, as it sarcastically became known. Some forms of deviant behavior even became identified as diseases, thereby taking them out of the rational motivational debate and placing them into the area of afflictions beyond human control. Toward the end of the Twentieth Century it became fashionable to conceive of criminal behavior as the response to abuse endured by the accused during maturation, an approach which euphemistically became known as the abuse excuse.

But as prolific and diverse as these theories might have been, as we entered into the Twentieth First Century we seemed no closer to explaining the horrid way in which we humans all too often act toward one another, or why we sometimes victimized one another in such atrocious ways, than we did during the dark ages. After hundreds of years of experimentation, research, and philosophical debate we seemed no closer to understanding why some people in our society commit despicable acts, and others do not, than we did when evil spirits were believed to be the cause of illness, insanity and criminal conduct. The best we seem to have been able to accomplish was to update the old concept of demonological causation into a modernized version of; the Devil made me do it.

The story that follows is not so much an attempt to define a new theoretical premise of crime causation than it is an exploration of motive and criminal conduct in modern times which seems to defy most theoretical classifications of crime causation. It is a story of murder most vile, but also murder most banal. It is the recounting of murder without the benefit of plausible explanation, or understandable motivation, which intellectually appeals to the commonality of our human experience. The story of the Bondurant brother’s excursion into the world of murder is not one neatly explainable in terms of criminological postulates; just as the brothers themselves are not a classical study in social deviance. They have been described as, ‘good ol’ boys’, ‘nice kids’, ‘a handful’, humorous, and sociable. There is, as best can be discerned, no history of adolescent deprivation, sexual abuse, or dysfunctional family characteristics that have become so prevalent in current trends as an explanation for criminality. What makes the Bondurants’ story at once so fascinating and at the same time so chilling, is that their experience, both sociological as well as personal, appears no different than that of most people who grew up in the Southeastern portion of the United States during the last half of the Twentieth Century. They grew up in small town America, in the South, with all the values, mores, and traditions that a goodly portion of Americans was exposed to during their maturation. They were the children of law abiding, respectable parents. They were not illiterate, mentally deficient, physically deprived, nor emotionally scared. The most fearful feature of the Bondurant’s story is that initially it reads like so many of our own, and yet it ends in a place that few of us will ever go. What made the difference? Why did these twins turn out so tragically different than the rest of the kids they grew up with? What was the motive that drove them to commit terrible crimes? This book is a study of that question, and the answer, if there ever can be one, may well lie in the context of what they did, and not in the fabric of what some commentator might observe.

The question of why write such a book as this can be answered in both academic and personal terms. Academically, the study of human deviance, in all its forms, better arms us as a society and as a species, to improve social conditions for ourselves and our posterity. Therefore, a careful examination of the crimes attributed to the Bondurant brothers is an academically valuable, if an admittedly abhorrent, undertaking. Personally, my fascination with crime and murder began at a very early age. When I was around the age of five or so, we lived just south of a dirt roads junction called, Rascal Town, in northeastern Lauderdale County, Alabama. Rascal Town, per se, consisted of little more than a general store, a blacksmith shop and a cotton gin, all owned by my uncle. My formal education started there in a two-room schoolhouse called, Palestine, but my personal educational in crime began in a pasture directly across from my grandmother’s house. I can recall quiet clearly one morning hearing my grandmother and mother going about their normal housekeeping duties as they discussed, in hushed tones, something that had occurred over night. Although they refused to tell me specifically what had happened, I learned a good deal from eavesdropping on their conversation. The first thing I noticed was that whatever it was that had happened, it had frightened them in a way that I felt rather than understood. I could sense from the way they spoke and the emotions behind the words they used that whatever had happened in the pasture across the road had been a very bad thing, a terrible thing. I had precious little experience with frightened adults, and the very fact that they were so afraid frightened me in turn, but beyond that there was also a dimension to their fear that was intriguing and at the same time dreadful. This newly discovered fear possessed a quality that was far worse than the shadows at night that lingered in my bedroom, or the imaged terrors waiting for me on the dark path to the outhouse late at night when I remembered the bogeymen stories the old people used to tell. I sensed that this strange, disturbing fear came from the same place my childhood fears originated, but this grown up fear seemed worse somehow because all my fears were of things insubstantial and what my parents feared resided was in a man and walked around like the rest of us.

I remember walking to the edge of my grandmother’s yard that morning and standing in the dust at the edge of the road. The field looked no different than it had the day before. I could see nothing horrible or fearful in the open pasture and cool recesses of the trees. The grass was still just as green as it had been the day before, the wind rattled in the trees the same as it had, and the crickets still clicked in the high weeds. It was the same as it had been, but even though I could not see it, could not pick out that one distinguishable thing that was different, I knew it was different somehow, and that it would always be different because it was the place where a horrible thing happened. I don’t remember walking across the dirt road, but I must have, because I do recall standing on the berm beyond the shallow ditch, holding onto the barbed wire as I stared mesmerized into the field that was forever changed. They had said there had been a stabbing there, a murder, but I could see no murder. They had said that the police in Florence, Alabama, had found the knife that was used to commit the crime on the front seat of the other boy’s car in the hospital parking lot, but I had no way of knowing how a knife caused a murder, or even what a murder was. At that age I knew what dying was. I’d been to my share of funerals, and to houses where they ‘set up with the dead’, all night. I’d eaten the excellent foods at people’s homes when I had gone there with my parents to where the body was laid out in the living room, but at that age I had no experience that helped me define the difference between being simply dead and being murdered dead. I still recall standing there, peering over that barbed wire fence and wanting so desperately to know what had happened in that field and why what had happened there had so alarmed the people I loved.

In the years to come I was never to lose the compelling desire to know why murder happened. In the course of time, I abandoned an art career for one in law enforcement, changed majors and received degrees in criminal justice at the undergraduate and master's levels (that was long before I knew that such academics achievements were less than beneficial to a career in a law enforcement in a small agency) and wrote a doctoral dissertation based upon motivation (only to learn the greater lesson; that advanced degrees are highly detrimental to a career in small town law enforcement). But it was not until all that was behind me that I began to understand that in an emotional sense, I was still that little boy standing at the fence trying to understand what had happened during the dark of night in a field that that would never be the same again.

So, you might say that this exploration of the Bondurant murders is another attempt of a not so young boy standing at a fence peering over the barbed wire and trying to latch onto a better understanding of what made two men commit a series of murders. And that by trying to achieve a better understanding of my own, to raise the bar, even if just a smidgen, on what we know and understand about why people commit murder. This then, is my contribution to the growing collection of fragmentary information about human motivation and deviance, about crime causation, and about a long out-of-fashion criminological theory called, evil.

Chapter 1

The Murders

The deep, blue-green waters of the Elk River winds lazily through the hills and valleys of southern Giles County, Tennessee like a lethargic dividing line separating the undulating countryside of Tennessee, where the Appalachian mountain chain peters out into ripples of diminishing hillocks toward the clinging red clay of northern Alabama. The river is a meandering watercourse gathering the feed-off of countless creeks, streams and tributaries along its way as it eddies toward the mighty Tennessee River, miles to the south. On warm summer days and cool autumn afternoons a person can stand on the banks of the Elk River and imagine the cliffs and over hangs along the river’s drifting shoreline alive with the resounding ghostly echoes of old time riverboat traffic. Flat bottom trading boats plied the Elk Valley waters as far back as the late 1700’s, transporting the growing promise of a new nation up and down the winding waterways of commerce long before man-made roads and highways were carved across the landscape. The river was the vital artery pumping burgeoning life into a wilderness filled with tantalizing promise, where men could make their living by the sweat of their brows and the generosity of the river.

The river gave birth, and eventually its name, to the original settlement that sprung up where Richland Creek emptied into the rolling Elk River. Later, becoming designated as lower Elkton, the original settlement grew so fast and became so prosperous that many people of the time thought it would become the county seat instead of that smaller, back water burg further north along the banks of Richland Creek named after the Revolutionary War hero, Pulaski. But as ever improving roads and highways were hacked out of the lush forests and hills of southern Giles County, the fortunes of the town along the Elk River receded with the shrinking river trade like a dwindling river caught in draught. By the 1830’s a road pushing south out of Nashville passed to the west and north of the ebbing little community of Elkton. The new road became a vital trade link between Alabama cities and the growing economic centers to the north. During the 1840’s the turnpike, as it had become known by then, created a new Elkton, farther west and north of the river’s run. This new town was originally called Upper Elkton, but as generations passed, and people forgot about the old settlement decaying beneath the vines and under growth at the juncture of Richland Creek and the Elk River, everyone simply began calling the town, Elkton.

Modern Elkton bears little resemblance to its predecessor. Spread out over 1.35 square miles and containing eight miles of paved roads, the Elkton of today lays on either side of state highway 31 like a reclining matron oblivious to her wrinkles and advancing age, lost in dreams of her youth. The hustle and heavy traffic of the old turnpike that had grown into highway 31, had long ago surrendered its claim as a major thoroughfare when Interstate 65 was created east of Elkton. The river, which once thrived on the cadence of oarsmen and cargo tenders, now drifts indifferently past Bluff Street, dipping silently under the two bridges that span the slow flowing waters. The two bridges stand almost as metaphor to the two Elktons. The older span, deserted and by passed, stands like a rusty specter of past glories next to the newer, Buford Gardner, bridge. The old bridge’s corroded iron superstructure fans out between the trees on either shore like decaying memories suspended over the flowing currents of time.

Just up from the bridges, at the intersection of highway 31 and Main Street, is Lib’s Grocery, a modern gas and quick stop market, where you can sip Eureka Joe’s cappuccino while you eat a New York styled pizza, or a made to order sandwich, and peruse the selection of video rentals in the back. Further north stands the Elkton United Methodist Church, at the intersection of highway 31 and state road 273 west, what the locals call the Prospect road. The old church, dressed stoically in red brick and old fashioned white trimmed arched stained glass windows, sits with its back to the north section of Elkton, as if it prefers to ignore that other place, that bad place that lays a little further up the road. North of the old church is David’s Mini Market, where the conversations is as spicy as the chicken strips and potato wedges served up in the deli, and the Elkton Car Wash next door, are the last stops along the way before arriving at the other leg of state road 273 (East), or what the locals call, the Bryson Road. Out east on Bryson Road, one and one half miles, is the interstate, and just beyond the underpass is the place the old church might well be turning its back on.

Bryson Road beyond the interstate holds a cluster of businesses, all on the north side of the pavement, and a lonely, windswept hill rising to the south. The first business past the interstate, dominated by the effigy of a ten feet tall chicken holding a deteriorating fork under one wing and a decaying knife under the other one is a sprawling restaurant, truck stop and gas operation doing business under a raised sign announcing it as the Shady Lawn Truck Stop. Further east, just past the parking areas full of big rigs and gas islands, is a Motel 6 decked out in green metal roof and beige stucco. Lying beyond the motel, under a long sign on its roof boasting Go Go Girls, is a windowless cinder block building painted light brown with somber dark red trim, and a gated parking lot advertising exotic dancers. As controversial as the Boobie Bungalow might be at times, it’s not the topless dancers inside or the sporadic media attention they generate that produces a queasy feeling in many of Elkton’s four hundred forty three citizens who pass the area from time to time. Rather, it’s the low hill rising to the south of the road, just outside the Elkton City limits sign that holds a dreadful grip on the community’s collective memory. The wide turn-in to the unkempt lot is locked now, metal tube gates bar entrance to a dirt path that leads to the top of the sloping rise, past an old, gnarled oak tree which looms over the entrance way half way up the slope like a sentry posted to guard the property from all the curiosity seekers who might venture into the place. Seven weathered oak trees form a semicircle on the crest of the rise where a house once stood, and it’s the house, or rather the house that used to stand on top of the windy, forsaken hill, that makes many residents experience an involuntary shudder as they pass by on Bryson Road below. Because it was in that house where the murders occurred, and it was behind the house where at least one of the bodies was dragged off down the backside of the hill toward the river and disposed of with fire.

Today, the seven oak trees grouped around the empty space at the top of the hill stand a silent, vigilant remembrance of the horrible things that took place on that windswept knoll one ghastly May night. Except for the trees, the hill is desolate, the land striving to reclaim its original dignity, but for the people who live in Elkton the memories of what happened on that hill in 1986 endure despite all efforts to dispel the horrible events from their collective memories. The river rolls along its perpetual journey, immersed in its own memories and haunted by its own ghosts, much like the people of Elkton. But the river’s ghosts are of long boats gliding down ancient trade routes laden with the promise of a glory that never materialized, while the people of Elkton have other spirits, more substantial, that disquiet them. Their phantoms are the ghosts of two young women who died macabre deaths in the old house that once stood on the hill out past the Bungalow and the plaguing heritage of the twins who killed them there.

Chapter 2

Identical twins are a fascinating aberration of nature. They are the original clones of creation that produces two, usually, distinct and separate human beings from a single fertilized egg. Twins are estimated to occur once in every two hundred and fifty births, making them an exceptional natural phenomenon but not a rare one. Much more common are what are known as, fraternal twins. Fraternal twins originate from two separate eggs and are not anymore physically similar than any other sibling pair born at different times. Fraternal twins share only about 50% of their genetic materials, while identical twins share complete genetic makeup.

Twins have become a popular scientific experimentation source for the nature v. nurture controversy. Many scientists have spent years exploring the age old question; are we products of our genes or of our environment. A good deal of the scientific work accomplished in recent years has involved using twins in trying to solve this dispute. Over time the pendulum of opinion has swung from one extreme to the other during the course of the debate. Advocates of the nature theory spent the earlier part of the 20th Century trying to prove the superiority of genetic influence on individual behavior utilizing experiments with twins, but the evidence was less compelling than expected, and as the 21st Century approached nurture resumed the dominate theory in the dispute. (1)

The ascendancy of environmental factors in the make up of human personality did not mean that scientific exploration ceased into the impact of genetic influences. Scientists discovered genes in the human make up that appeared to be the cause of some cancers. Some scientists thought they had even discovered genes that influenced sexual orientation and prevalence toward drug addiction. Even though not all these claims survived critical scrutiny, some studies have found statistical validation that tends to show genetics are involved with twins having similar physical stature, closely related health, IQ and political orientation. But critics of these theories contend that the statistical findings reported by advocates of nature theory are really the result of socialization and parenting influences rather than chemical structuring.

Recent comparative studies of separated twins has attempted to refocused attention back to genetic similarities. Studies conducted during the 1970’s and 1980’s demonstrated that identical twins separated at, or near birth, possessed many of the same behavioral characteristics. One of the most famous studies conducted in this field of inquiry was that of Thomas Bouchard, with the University of Minnesota, which studied 60 pairs of twins and concluded that the twins had unexpected similarities when assessed by objective testing devices.

But just because twins have remarkable similarities doesn’t mean that they are always personally compatible. There are numerous documented cases of one twin murdering the other; In 1991, Jeff Henry killed his twin brother, Greg, in Douglas County, Georgia after years of battling through a deteriorating relationship; Tim Nicholson shot Todd, his twin brother to death, in Temple City, Ca. in 1964, after their lives spiraled out of control; Dorthea Beck beat her twin sister, Mary, to death in Alton, Illinois in 1995 when the frailer twin lost the will to live; and Janie Dietrich set fire to the living room of the house she shared with her twin sister, Genie, in 1996 in Hamilton, Ohio, to relieve her depressed twin of the burden of her life. But twins have also used their unique relationship to conspire to commit murder against others as well. One of the more infamous cases of twins facilitating murder comes out of Huntsville, Alabama where Betty Wilson was accused of getting her twin, Peggy Lowe, to help Betty murder her husband, Dr. Jack Wilson, a noted ophthalmologist in Northern Alabama in 1992. It was alleged during the sensational trial of Betty Wilson that she had her twin engage a self-professed hit man whose penchant for loose lipped alcoholic bragging outweighed what should have been his natural sense of caution. Although Betty was convicted for Dr. Wilson’s murder her sister, Peggy, was acquitted for her part in the murder plot amid a media saturated trial that left all Northern Alabama murmuring about the case for years afterwards.

There are case histories of twins preying on their own children, such as Jean and Jane Hopkins of Dallas, Texas. In 1994, Jean, suffering from delusions of persecution, tried to kill herself and her two and three year old sons; by ingesting fatal doses of an antidepressant drug she had been prescribed. Although she and her sons were saved just in the nick of time, her sister Jane was not so lucky when her bouts of delusions overcame her in 1997. Taking a long steak knife from her kitchen, Jane first stabbed her nine year old son to death in their suburban back yard and then carried her four year old daughter into the bathroom where she stabbed her to death in the shower before plunging the bloody knife into her own heart.

And there are cases of twins preying on the general public. Notable among these notorious twins are the Spitzer brothers; George and Stefan of Marina Del Rey, California. The Spitzer brothers were convicted in 1998 for the rape of a string of Southern California women over a number of years using a potent drug they purchased in Mexico called rohypnol. Using the powerful drug, the brothers spiked women’s drinks that caught their fancy rendering them unconscious. Once the women were out cold they took them to their apartment where they took turns raping the comatose victims while they videotaped their crimes. But as atrocious as the Spitzer brothers’ crimes may have been they paled in comparison with a set of London twins; Ronnie and Reggie Kray. In the 1960’s the Kray brothers became infamous as the top gangsters in England. The brothers were the toast of the social elite who frequented their gambling houses in Great Britain until they were imprisoned for life in 1969 for murders they had individually committed at the high point of their criminal empire. (2)

Astonishingly, even in the womb twins are not always kind to their sibling. A chilling phenomenon in prenatal twin development known as the runting effect has been discovered by scientists in recent years. The runting effect is a tendency of one twin to attempt to consume more of the womb’s nutrition at the expense of the other twin. In effect, even before they are born one twin is trying to survive by using up the life force of their sibling, a condition almost akin to cannibalism.

But if genetic factors do not explain the similarities between identical twins, why are there so many affinities? Studies have found that sociological factors are associated with drug use by fraternal and identical twins evenly, but identical twins demonstrate a difference. Studies have found that an identical twin is far more prone to drug addiction if the other twin is already an addict than are fraternal twins.

So, what makes twins different? A host of explanations have been explored, including chaos theory. The basis of chaos theory is that tiny changes made within larger system produces immense changes in complex systems. In one study of twins, computer analysis predicted that a tiny alteration occurring during the embryonic stage of development results in significant differences between twins when they reach adulthood.

Whatever the truth of the origins of personality, twins remain intriguing as a social anomaly, and we, as a culture and as individuals, are morbidly fascinated when twins commit deviant acts. The question of why they did it? What motivated them? Did they have a choice or were they destined to run afoul of our societal values and morals, plague us all the more because twins symbolize a larger mystery; why does anyone become a criminal? But in twins we sense a visceral anxiety, an age old dread linked to ancient ideas about evil and primordial superstitions that lurk in the ill-defined dark corners of our enlightened times. Twins who exhibit horrific tendencies toward hideous atrocities unsettle the confidence we assume we have about our world and what we can count on as being predictable and real. Twin murderers mentally drag antediluvian trepidation's out of the caves of a long forgotten communal past and threaten the secure foundations of concepts we live by in our modern world.

In a subverted way, twins who murder just for the fun of it, become a perverted inversion of the television ad; twice the pleasure, twice the fun. Begging the questions; is evil compoundable? Is wickedness amenable to multiplication? Is the growth of iniquity exponential? Has it no end, no limits from which we can expect some sort of quantification which will allow us to deal with it? We are cast defenseless and unarmed into a twisting labyrinth of ambiguity, where the familiar and the comfortable are no longer stable foundations of our daily experience. We become apprehensive at the prospect of such limitless evil, but it is made worse because it is a nebulas fear without form or definition, which is all the more chilling because we sense a profundity about it which speaks to a nature that is older than our written histories and more substantial, in its ageless ways, than the scientific methods upon which we have come to depend. Diabolical twins conjure up a subliminal disquiet like worms wiggling in our dreams or shallow breathing heard from distant and dark rooms while we are alone at night.

Twins who commit atrocious deeds become the golden fleece of a suppressed civilized angst, a cloaked suspicion that we may not be much better than our marauding ancestors who killed for sport and the accumulation of tribute. They cause a lingering doubt that the centrally heated and air conditioned modern day caves we dwell in still house all the precariously unhinged psychological fabrics of creatures not far removed from the animalistic bipeds blundering through threatening landscapes of chance events and incomprehensible elements. Clutched in the fog of such doubt the cloth of our civilization wears thin. We begin to see the nakedness beneath, and sense, like the trapped dreamer who cannot escape the terror of their slumber, a driving need to vest ourselves in the warm garments of the warranty of reason.

Twins who murder are unsettling, but twins who murder as wantonly, as cruelly, as pitilessly as the Bondurants were convicted of doing, evoke a gnawing disquiet within our psyches that demands rationality and explanation so that we can quickly reconstruct the infrastructure of an ordered existence. This is why the Bondurant twins are so disturbing. Horrific enough what they did, but where and how they did it, claws at the social consciousness of not only the collective community but at the individuals’ peace of mind of those who are forced to admit the horrible acts into the confines of a life and society which had not included such depravities before. The legacy of the Bondurant brothers is the stuff of which fearful stories are woven, of bedtime tales of duplicate boogiemen who will exercise unspeakable horrors on disobedient little girls and boys. They become the fears of small children with covers pulled to their chins, and eyes desperately searching the deep shadows of closets and under beds. But they also become the unspoken restlessness of adults who dare not speak openly of what happened to those other people, to the ones that haunt their memories but of whom no one gives the life of speech. The heritage of the Bondurant brothers becomes the quick glance over the shoulder in the night, the hesitation on entering a dark room, or a long look before leaving work after dusk. But it did not start out that way. In the beginning they were just two baby twins, like so many others, who came into this world to proud parents who held high expectations for their darling little duo.

The historic facts surrounding the brothers are straightforward enough. Hugh Peter (Jr.) and Kenneth Patterson Bondurant were born on April 4, 1955 in Memphis, Tennessee. They were the first two of four children that would eventually be born to Hugh Peter and Sydney Lipcomb Poly Bondurant. Both parents were civil service employees with the U.S. Army at the time of the twins’ birth. Another boy, Sidney Lipcomb would come along three years later, and a sister, Alyce Ruth two years after that. Their parents’ employment took them on a variety of assignments with the Army and the family traveled with them from posting to posting. By the late 1960’s the Bondurant family had settled in Elkton, Tennessee. At the time their father had a job at Red Stone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama, and their mother took a position as a substitute teacher with the Giles County Board of Education, eventually being employed full time as a teacher at Elkton Elementary School.

The twins graduated from Elkton High School on June 2, 1973. Pat professed to have attended Martin Methodist College for one semester following high school, and although the college has no record of his attendance some old professors there still remember him. Shortly after attending Martin College, Pat went to work for the Pulaski Rubber Company on December 3, 1973 and held that job without interruption until April 1990.

Pete graduated with his brother and like Pat, Pete tried to secure a job following high school, but unlike Pat, Pete could never seem to hold on to steady employment for very long. A review of his work history is as migratory and elusive as other parts of his life. Pete entered service with the U. S. Army on September 18, 1973 but only managed to stay with the military for one month and one day, departing service on October 18, 1973 with an honorable discharge. From October 1973 until March 1974, Pete worked at the Elkton Farm Supply store. From March, 1974 until July, 1974 he was employed at the Shady Lawn Truck Stop, but attempts to verify that employment is stifled because records with the company do not extend that far back. In July of 1974 Pete claims that he worked for the Lipscomb (strangely close to his mother’s maiden name, Lipcomb) Trucking Company out of Jackson, Mississippi, but there is no current listing for the company.

In the spring of 1980 Pete claims he worked for the Elkton Farm Supply Company again, but the owner denies on official records he worked there at that time. There are records that do show Pete working for the Ardmore Printing Company in the spring and summer of 1980, and from August 1982 until November of the following year, Pete claims that he was employed as a cook with a U.S. Army day care center in Ausbery, Germany, but that employment too cannot be substantiated by objective record.

For three weeks in 1984 Pete claims he worked for a Ramada Inn in Atlanta, Georgia, but again, this brief stint of employment cannot be confirmed, just as the six months he claimed to have worked for Braco Brakes in Atlanta, in 1984 or 1985 (he is not certain which year it was) cannot be officially accounted for on record. November 1987 to May or June of 1988, Pete claims he worked as a cook for a bowling alley, again in Ausbery, Germany, but again it is an employment that cannot be validated, just as his last alleged employment as a truck driver in Oklahoma or Nebraska cannot be backed up with solid facts.

There is one phase of Pete’s life that is reliably and accurately accounted for. In 1975 Pete Bondurant was convicted of murder and attempted murder in Cincinnati, Ohio. According to the Cincinnati Police investigation of the case Pete had become aquatinted with two men; Roger Sellers and Roger Mills shortly before August 24, 1974. Pete had stayed with the two men and two young women, Sandy and Carol, at apartment forty, 3050 Mickey Avenue, in Cincinnati. Late in the evening of August 24, the two women left the apartment to pick up cigarettes and soft drinks at a nearby store. Gone only a short time, they came back to the apartment to find the door locked from the inside. Their repeated knocks were finally answered by Pete Bondurant, who unlocked the door and allowed the women into the apartment. As they passed through the door they recalled Pete standing in front of them holding a knife and saying something to the affect, you’re next. Looking beyond Pete the women saw the other two men. Roger Sellers lay bleeding just beyond the door, and Roger Mills lay nude and smeared with blood on the couch, where they had left him asleep when they went to the store. Both men had suffered multiple stab wounds. The women began scurrying about gathering towels and trying to attend to the wounded men. Their cries drew neighbors to the scene and the police were called.

Pete ran from the house and was intercepted by arriving patrol units as he exited the apartment building onto the street. Pete began waving his arms and shouting at the policemen that he was the one they were looking for, that he had stabbed the men. He was immediately placed into custody and secured inside one of the patrol cars. One of the officers was left behind to guard Pete while the other officer raced up to apartment 40 to assess the scene. Both injured men were transported to a nearby hospital while Pete and other witnesses were taken to the local police precinct to be interviewed by Cincinnati Homicide Detective Henry Drescher. In a statement to Drescher, Pete claimed that he had met Roger Mills at a Y.M.C.A. in Jackson, Mississippi, and that they had trucked up to Cincinnati a couple of days before the stabbing occurred. Pete recounted drugs being used by the occupants of the apartment on Mickey Avenue during the time he stayed there and that Mills and Sellers had become suspicious of him informing on their activities. He denied that he used any drugs, saying that when offered them he pretended to swallow them, but actually secreted them under his lip and put the drugs back in their bottle when no one was looking. At one point during his interview Bondurant claimed his car had been stolen by his housemates. Drescher learned from other witnesses that the car had actually broken down somewhere in Kentucky and that Pete and the others who were living in the house, had hitchhiked back to Cincinnati after abandoning the car.

In his recorded statement to police, Bondurant described how Sellers and Mills had threatened him. He said that earlier that night they had taken money and a pocketknife from him, wakened him and threatened him with a knife and soft drink bottle. He told Drescher how he had begged them not to hurt him; how he had asked for the return of a silver dollar they had taken from him which had been given him by his mother. Bondurant told how he had tried to reason with the two men, but instead of freeing him they had taken even more drugs and refused to give him either his property or his freedom. In his account, Pete told the detective that when he had tried to leave, the two men had jumped him and that he had grabbed for something in an attempt to fight back. The object he picked up, he told Drescher, turned out to be a screwdriver. Pete could not recall how many times he had stabbed either man. He said that he went berserk. He did recall that he had stabbed each man in the chest, because, he asserted, he was fighting for his life. At the point in his story where Carol and Sandy had returned from the store, Pete told Detective Drescher that the women had started crying and saying to the two wounded men that they had told them not to do anything to (Pete) him. Pete said as soon as the women arrived he left and went downstairs. He said he had sat down and thought about his options. He knew he could run back to Tennessee but that it would only be a matter of time before Ohio authorities came to get him. He said he decided to go down to the local police station house and report what had happened. Just as he was walking out into the street to head toward the police station Pete said the police cars came up. He said he flagged them down and reported what had happened to him in the apartment.

In Pete’s view he had only defended himself, and the other two men had been the aggressors. He concluded the interview by telling Detective Drescher, I don’t know how the judge is going to take it, but to me it was self-defense. It was either me or them. And my neck is just as precious as anybody else’s.

In succeeding interviews with Sandy and Carol, Detective Drescher began to draw a slightly different picture of what might have transpired in apartment number 40 while the women were absent. Sandy, who was only seventeen at the time, told Drescher of Pete Bondurant flashing a knife around a few days before the stabbing, and of how the others had ask him to put it away. She told the detective that during the time Pete stayed at the apartment he had asked Carol to marry him and go away with him. She recalled that for reasons unknown to her, Pete had suddenly threatened to call the police one day because he said Roger Mills was a wanted man and then, just as erratically, he accused Sellers of stealing his car. Sandy told Dresher that earlier that evening she and Carol had gone to buy cigarettes and soft drinks around ten thirty or eleven p.m., and that when they returned the door to the apartment was locked. She said they had knocked and that Carol had called out to open the door. Sandy recalled that when the door was finally opened, Pete Bondurant was standing in the doorway with a knife in his hand. She described how she saw her boyfriend, Roger Sellers, laying on the floor just beyond the door covered with blood, and how Carol had ran to Mills who was equally blood splattered where he lay on the couch. She remembered a neighbor lady coming in and quickly leaving to call the police. When asked if Sellers made any statement to her when she discovered him, Sandy told the detective that he had said, I never done nothin’. And when asked about how the stabbing took place, she repeated that Sellers had told her, I was just sittin’ here and he started stabbin’ me in the back. Ending her statement to police, Sandy had no recollection of Bondurant leaving the apartment, but she knew that he must have left at some point.

Carol, who Pete had described in his statement at the little bitty short one, agreed with most of Sandy’s recollections of the events of their return to the apartment, but she remembered that when Pete had opened the door for them that he had told them to come in, they were next. Carol remembered rushing into the apartment and seeing Mills on the couch, blood covering his neck and chest. She said that she started to back up and that Pete had started toward her with a knife in his hand. She said that she had begun pleading with him not to hurt her. At that point she said he was distracted by Sandy going into the kitchen, and that Pete left the apartment when Sandy said she was going to call the police.

Patrolman Charles Schwab, one of the officers responding to the complaint, reported that he had been left with Bondurant in the patrol car while his partner had gone up to apartment 40. He said that after back up officers, Floyd Lanter and Bob Ramstetter arrived and took over guarding the prisoner, he rushed to the scene to aid his partner. He reported finding several people in the apartment when he first arrived. One person he recalled being in the apartment was a man identified as the apartment manager. The manager pointed to a blanket on the floor that he said was covering a knife he had spotted when he came in. In his report Schwab said that he pulled back the blanket and discovered a blood stained steak knife lying on the floor. Schwab said he found other knives, one broken, scattered about the apartment.

While officers were obtaining aid for the victims and securing the crime scene in the apartment, back up officers Lanter and Ramstetter chatted with Pete in the patrol car. After advising him of his rights, they asked him what had happened. Ramstetter reported to Dresher that Pete told him about Mills and Sellers coming into the room where he had been asleep and how they threw a knife at his feet. One of them told him to take his shoes and socks off. Then Ramstetter reported a version of events preceding the stabbing which was not the same as that told to Dresher by Pete during his interview with the detective. In the embellished version of the story Ramstetter said, I think he said, Mills took off his pants, and told him if he’d uh suck’em both off, they wouldn’t do nothin’ to ‘im. He said you might as well cut my throat now. And at ... that time they... came after ‘im with a bottle. Ramstetter added in his report that Bondurant had mentioned that when the women returned to the apartment and discovered the bodies they had made a comment, the meaning of which, Bondurant claimed he did not understand. Bondurant reportedly told Ramstetter, And they said uh well they shouldn’t of been doin’ this to you.

In the Ramstetter report Pete had not only included self-defense as a rationalization for his violence but vindicated himself even further with allegations of homosexual aggression and third party justification, validations which apparently he believed would illicit sympathy from the macho cops surrounding him. But whatever the intent of such justifications, they could not override the damning evidence that pointed to the fact that Roger Mills had been asleep on the couch when he was attacked and that, according to the autopsy report submitted by Dr. Paul Jolly, Mills had died from injuries sustained by the infliction of 46 stab wounds about his chest, neck and arms, forty of which were accomplished with a screwdriver and another 5 or 6 with a knife. Sellers, who had survived the attack, had sustained approximately forty stab wounds, and though his memory was hazy about what happened after he had left Mills asleep on the couch and gone to the bathroom, the evidence did not leave a hazy impression on the sentencing judge in the case. The presiding judge convicted Hugh Peter Bondurant, Jr. of manslaughter in the death of Roger Mills and sentenced him to seven to twenty five years in the state penitentiary. He also convicted him of attempted manslaughter in the assault of Roger Sellers and imposed an additional five to fifteen years, to run concurrently with the manslaughter conviction.

Pete arrived at the state Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio on January 10, 1975. He was later transferred to the state correctional facility in Lebanon, Ohio on February 24, 1975, where he stayed until he was paroled on February 7, 1980. At the time of his parole, Pete had served only five years and twenty-eight days for the death of one man and the attempted murder of another.

Under the provisions of an interstate compact that allows states to exchange paroled and probationed people from one state to another, Pete’s parole was transferred to his resident state, Tennessee. Eugene Holman, at that time a parole officer with the Tennessee Department of Probation and Parole, was assigned as Pete’s case officer. The official parole date from Ohio custody was listed as January 11, 1980. Since Pete had been convicted in the State of Ohio, and not Tennessee, the conditions of his parole were defined by Ohio State law. During the early 1980’s in the State of Ohio a parolee served only one year when placed on parole, regardless of the length of imprisonment set forth in their original sentence. At the end of the one-year, if they had not violated any of the terms of their parole, they were deemed to have successfully completed their sentence. After serving his one-year as an employee of Athens State College’s library, Pete’s sentence for murder and attempted murder were deemed completed on March 31, 1981, and he was released from supervision.

What is disturbing to a lot of people who learn of Bondurant’s short prison term and brief stint on parole is that should Pete have been made to serve his entire original sentence he would have been in prison in Ohio until September 29, 2004. If he had been made to serve all his original twenty-five years, he would not have been free to participate in the murders of Gwen Dugger, Terri Clark and Ronnie Gaines. If indeed the murders would have occurred at all, because there is reason to suspect that should Pete not have been with Pat during this time to support him psychologically, none of these later murders may have happened. Of Course, there is no proof that things would have worked out any different than they did, but many might wonder what the outcome would have been if the brothers had remained separated, and for the families of the victims any possibility which may have prevented the death of their loved ones is painful to contemplate.

It is cases such as Pete Bondurant’s early release and subsequent participation in more murders that haunt prison and sentencing reform advocates. Is endangering innocent lives worth the reduction in prison time served by convicted criminals? Even if lowering prison populations does save tax dollars, and some parolees do not commit