Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard

By Lovejoy Boteler

In 1968, during Albert Lepard’s fifth escape from a life sentence at Parchman Penitentiary, he kidnapped Lovejoy Boteler, then eighteen years old, from his family’s farm in Grenada, Mississippi. Three decades later, still beset by half-buried memories of that time, Boteler began researching his kidnapper’s nefarious, sordid life to discover how and why this terrifying abduction occurred.

Crooked Snake: The Life and Crimes of Albert Lepard is the true story of Lepard, sentenced to life in Parchman for the murder of seventy-four-year-old Mary Young in 1959. During the course of his sentence, Lepard escaped from prison six times in fourteen years.

In Crooked Snake, Boteler pieces together the story of this cold-blooded murderer's life using both historical records and personal interviews—over seventy in all—with ex-convicts who gravitated to and ran with Lepard, the family members who fed and sheltered the fugitive during his escapes, the law officers who hunted him, and the regular folks who were victimized in his terrible wake.

Throughout Crooked Snake, Boteler reveals his kidnapper’s hardscrabble childhood and tracks his whereabouts before his incarceration and during his jailbreaks. Lepard’s escapes take him to Florida, Michigan, Kansas, California, and Mexico. Crooked Snake captures a slice of history and a landscape that is fast disappearing. These vignettes describe Mississippi’s countryside and spirit, ranging from sharecropper family gatherings in Attala County’s Seneasha Valley to the twenty-thousand-acre Parchman farm and its borderlands teeming with alligator, panther, bear, and wild boar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Feb 19, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496821720

Book preview

1

JACKSON

I don’t know how many people were kidnapped in Mississippi in 1968, but I was one of them. I was taken from my family farm that June by two escaped convicts from Parchman Penitentiary—John Parker, convicted of armed robbery, and Albert Lepard, sentenced to life for murder. I was sure I would die.

Despite the terror of that event, I survived. My life has moved far beyond the bean field where it happened. I finished college, clerked for the legislature, worked on the river, was a rodeo hand in Colorado, had a family, built houses, taught school, and made music and furniture. But I have told this story at least once a year to most anyone who would listen.

My wife, who has heard the account a hundred times, said I should—must—write it down. But I wasn’t so sure. This particular slice of history ought to be told to wide-eyed kids around a fire pit on a moonlit night, or to folks getting tipsy at a cocktail party before dusk. Being kidnapped was quite an oddity.

In 1963, when I was thirteen, Frank Sinatra Jr. had been kidnapped for two days. I had a vague memory of that news because my parents talked about it around the dinner table. Patty Hearst was taken in 1974 by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army and would not be found for a year and a half. After her ordeal the world became familiar with Stockholm syndrome, a condition that causes hostages to develop a psychological alliance with their captors as a survival strategy. They were both nineteen at the time of their kidnappings.

Images of my abductors had slipped in and out of my thoughts for a long time in mean snippets of memory … their ominous approach on our field road … the tense encounter … a revolver in my ribs … fear … commotion.

Deep in the bottom drawer of an old walnut secretary in the living room was the kidnap scrapbook my mother had made for me after I was abducted. She had been greatly disquieted by the whole affair.

I tunneled under mounds of paper to exhume the musty relic. It contained photographs and news articles from the Jackson Clarion Ledger and the Memphis Commercial Appeal, with a list of the convicts’ crimes. Their defiant mug shots stared from the newsprint. Lepard’s menacing don’t-give-a-damn gaze was etched in my psyche and gave me a jolt. A grainy black-and-white photo of me holding my hands up as a detective examined my fingerprints shot me back to the scene of the crime. I was eighteen years old.

On the last page of the album was a letter from the penitentiary addressed to my father, a member of the state legislature, thanking him for the part I played in the capture of the convicts. It read:

August 5, 1968

Honorable E. L.

Boteler Riverdale Farms

Route 3

Grenada, Mississippi

Dear Sir:

Enclosed is Application for Reward in the case of Albert Lee Lepard and John Parker. Please have your son, Wallace Lovejoy Boteler, sign before a Notary Public and return to us. Upon receipt we will forward to the Executive Department with our request for payment.

We would like to extend our compliments to your son on the manner in which he handled such a delicate situation.

Sincerely,

B. C. Ruth

Classification Officer

Parchman sent me a reward of fifty dollars, a remarkable sum for a Mississippi farm boy in 1968. I closed my eyes and let the memory of that uncommon time envelop me … the red-haired killer … hot wind through the truck … my brother’s rifle, my pistol, their pistol … the long ride. I snapped out of it … focused on the present.

I needed to find one more vital artifact—the pair of 1922 Peace silver dollars Lepard left me. My mother had carefully glued the coins on a rectangle of red felt and put them in a simple black frame. I rummaged around the house most of the morning, but to no avail. Frustrated and about to abandon the search, I reached up and felt around the top edge of a tall hutch. There they were. Hidden away years ago for safekeeping, so secure they were almost lost. The coins were tarnished tokens with a worth to me far beyond their face value. Decades earlier, Lepard held these coins in his hand and for a strange reason known only to him, left them in the pocket of our farm truck for me to find. I’ve shown them to a few people … not many.

The Clarion Ledger stated that Lepard hailed from Newport, a wild and rugged place in central Mississippi. A coffee-stained roadmap pinpointed Newport as a mere dot seventy miles northeast of Jackson. I debated the wisdom of going there, but the spark had been struck. Now was the time to unearth the life of this felon from my past. I fervently hoped to find other people who were, like me, his victims—tied up and robbed, abducted, or worse. And I would try to meet his family.

The next morning, armed with the two silver dollars in my pocket, I hugged my wife, told her not to worry, that I would be home for supper. And, as she later said, I just took off.

I departed for Newport with little fanfare, leaving the polite society of Jackson, aiming for a remote hamlet in the rough heart of Mississippi, where people most likely wouldn’t take kindly to nosy strangers.

2

NEWPORT

The truck rolled to a stop at the intersection of Highways 14 and 429, far from any major thoroughfare. A green and white sign read, Newport. I was the proverbial stranger in a strange land, an interloper, but a man on a mission. I had arrived at this isolated spot thirty-five years after being kidnapped—on the trail of my long-ago abductor.

There were no passing cars or stores bustling with customers, no strolling window shoppers or children riding bicycles. Just two buildings: a church and a restaurant, facing each other across an empty expanse of highway.

A languid breeze blew out of the southwest, drawing moisture from a silvery lake. Surrounding the lake, a few rustic houses showed little sign of activity. Across the pasture where the valley floor rose to meet the hills, a faint summer haze hung over a line of distant oak trees in the afternoon light, suggesting long-held secrets hidden in the forest beyond.

Farther to the east, a gravel road forked south from the blacktop, winding into the hills. Partially hidden in a grove of pecan trees, a white frame house stood right off the gravel road. I drove up the ruts, scattering a flock of chickens and one rooster. The banty male was roaming the yard, pecking the slick ground and nosing a scattering of paper garbage. I opened the truck door and the startled rooster chased his harem of hens under a flat-tired, green Ford station wagon parked in the side yard. A mangy black dog hiding beneath the half-rotted front steps growled at me. As I neared, he retreated farther under the house but kept up his low snarl.

I walked up the well-worn steps onto the porch and knocked on the flimsy screen door. I heard the whisk of house slippers shuffling forward, too slow to be a young person. The door opened and an elderly woman with coal-dark eyes peeked out. Her face was thin and worn; her hair flecked with gray. She appraised me.

Kin I help you?

I hadn’t prepared what I wanted to say … felt awkward. I blurted out the first words that came to mind.

I had a run-in with Albert Lepard … but I was young.

There was a moment of silence.

Well, bless your heart. Come on in. The acrid smell of day-old turnip greens emanated from a darkened room in the rear of the house.

Johnny! she called, then took my arm and guided me to a threadbare brown couch in the small sitting room. Across the room, I was startled to see a bare-chested man wearing a green John Deere cap, faded jeans, and no shoes. He sat in a straight-backed chair staring at me. I thought he might be her son. He never spoke.

Johnny! she called again, this time more emphatically.

A silver-haired man in khaki pants and a loose white shirt emerged from the dim hall and looked at me with mild wonderment. I shook his hand, introduced myself, briefly told my story, and asked if they might be willing to share what they knew about Albert Lepard. They looked at each other, unsure of what to say. So I showed them the two 1922 silver dollars Lepard left me. Johnny reached for the coins, closely examining them as if they were ancient relics.

Yes, we knew him, the woman said. She introduced herself as Margie Faye Hutchison. Her sister, Betty Jean, was married to Ray Edwards, Albert Lepard’s first cousin. She and Johnny knew all the Lepards.

Johnny proceeded to name a few. There was Bilbo, Jarsh, and Otis. Them was all brothers that played fiddle and mandolin. Bilbo’s son, Earnest, was gut-cut in a knife fight and throwed in the Kosciusko jail! He stuffed his intestines back into a foot-long wound and stitched hisself up on the floor of the jail, somehow or ‘other.

Johnny added that after his release from jail, Earnest would proudly pull up his shirt and show that huge, ugly scar across his abdomen. He was a massive man, and like many Lepards of that generation, Earnest liked to fight.

You know, any normal human being couldn’t have survived that, Johnny said, almost reverently.

That was a Lepard for you, Margie added. Earnest once picked up a five-hundred pound bale of cotton using only his teeth.

I guided the conversation back to Albert Lepard. They told me he had a hideout in the deep woods, a secluded place called Flowing Well, where Margie once took him food when he was on the lam from the law. She admitted her part in helping Lepard.

I took it in one of them pie plates. Cornbread, peas, and butter beans. And a glass of tea. I took that food over there, he reached out and got it, and I come to the house. I knew I was doing wrong by feeding him. But I’m not gonna let a dog go hungry if I can help it. I might have to go to jail, but I shore fed him. Yeah, he loved ice tea.

I sensed there was much more they could tell me about Lepard, but this was all they were willing to reveal. How did she know he was at Flowing Well? People told her but she wouldn’t say who.

Johnny suggested I should go down the highway and talk to Bailey Hutchison. He made it clear that despite sharing the same last name, they were not related.

"Bailey could tell you a lot," he said, nodding.

Margie added another note about Lepard. I never was scared of him, and, honey, if he was to call me today, if he was living and sitting back there somewhere, and didn’t have food, I’d take it to him.

People do have feelings for him, Johnny added.

I thanked them for their hospitality, and as I stood to leave I glanced into the corner of the shady room. The silent half-dressed man’s eyes followed me all the way out the door.

Margie and Johnny Hutchison were my introduction to an eccentric world, one that would consume me for the next few years. But, my immediate goal was to find Bailey Hutchison and learn what he knew about the man who had once rammed a pistol in my side.

Bailey’s property stretched out behind his house, land farmed most of his life but was now laid by because he was retired. His home was a simple red brick building on the south side of Highway 14, surrounded by a spring pasture of Bermuda grass. In the distance, a line of trees defined where Seneasha Creek wound its way through the valley, its small swirling eddies carrying sediment downstream to the Big Black River. The pungent smell of newly mown hay floated in the air. Across the pasture, round bales dotted the landscape like tawny anthills.

When I asked him if he had known Albert Lepard, Bailey laughed, Yeah, I knew him, come on in.

He had been watching a Mississippi State football game and motioned for me to take a seat on a plaid ottoman next to his worn recliner. He reached forward to turn down the sound. I told him about my close encounter with Lepard in 1968, and showed him the two tarnished silver dollars. He smiled, took a sip of iced tea. He began to tell me, in his slow drawl, what he remembered about Lepard and his family. Otis Lepard had sharecropped on Bailey’s farm.

Ruby, Otis’s wife—Albert’s mother—was Mr. Henry Tullos’s daughter. They were pretty poor. Mama use’ to give ’em clothes all the time … try to help ’em. My mother felt real sorry for ’em, you know. Them kids lived there with their daddy after their mother died. They daddy was gon’ make a crop with me but somehow or other he didn’t.

Bailey couldn’t immediately name all the children, but said for a short time they lived right yonder, pointing out his rear window toward the hills where a power line now crossed his land. But most of the time, however, Otis and Ruby Lepard lived with their six children on the Hemingway Place two miles south of Newport. They considered it home and always returned to the place when they weren’t living a migrant life.

The children he finally remembered were—in order of age, from the oldest—Kathleen, Homer, Jesse Dee, Albert, Marguerite, and Tom Anderson. From the time they were big enough to carry flour sacks, they toiled in the cotton fields with their mother.

Otis was considered unreliable because of his insatiable thirst for liquor. He always had trouble establishing a long-term relationship with a landowner, and hauled his wife and children along from job to job.

In a sharecropping arrangement, the landowner typically would provide advance money to help the sharecropper get started. Occasionally, the landowner had to demand his money back when things didn’t pan out.

Bailey remembered, For some reason, he turned his mules and plow tools over to a black fella on the place. So I just went down there and told him, ‘You not gon’ work a crop, you got to go and I want my money back before you go.’ He gave me my money and moved on.

The late afternoon sun dipped toward the ridge as my first visit to Newport came to an end. Margie, Johnny, and Bailey spoke openly about Albert Lepard. Margie admitted she took Albert food when he was desperate and hiding at Flowing Well, a hidden refuge far back in the woods. Johnny momentarily became emotional about Albert’s plight, and Bailey gave me a better understanding of the hand-to-mouth existence of Otis Lepard and his family.

Over the next few weeks, other residents of the valley came forward, mostly family members. Willie McDaniel, John Henry Lepard, Ray Edwards, and Earline Lepard told me intimate and often gripping stories about their wayward relative.

Albert Lee Lepard was born July 25, 1934, in southern Attala County, Mississippi in a small valley carved by Seneasha Creek. Seneasha (Sin-e-ash) is based on a Choctaw word (sinti-asha) loosely meaning crooked snake.

Albert’s most identifying feature all his life was a shock of red hair—wild and bushy for his small frame. His family was poor and existed in a social stratum slightly above the cows and horses, but lower than everyone else. Wearing their hand-me-down clothes, the Lepards scratched out a living in the bleak years of the Great Depression.

Albert’s father, Otis, when he wasn’t drunk, was known to have an affable personality. He made a feeble effort at sharecropping, but it was Albert’s mother, Ruby, who mostly worked the fields with her children. The rough husks of the cotton would leave their hands raw and bloody by day’s end. Everyone knew Ruby was slightly off, but she loved her children, especially Albert.

Otis and his brothers lived in an alchemy of violence and mountain music. In the loamy sand hills bordering the Seneasha Valley they played the ballads passed down from their great-grandparents in the years after the Civil War, ones that told of heartache and loss so deep, that the emotions were still palpable one hundred years later. They knew songs from the Great Depression, Going Down That Road Feeling Bad and One Dime Blues—anthems for the dispossessed.

They emulated the drunken tunesmith and Alabama heartthrob, Hank Williams. Music filtered into the Seneasha Valley from the mountains of North Carolina through Alabama: Etta Baker, a grandma who could play a flat-top guitar with a jackknife; Doc Watson, the blind picker and singer of enormous talent; and Earl Scruggs, with his sizzling, innovative, five-finger banjo style.

The Lepard brothers would rock the valley, carrying on the old musical traditions vital to their souls. Old-timers in the region still tell of their rambunctious house parties.

Albert was remembered as a quiet boy with musical talent. He hung around the edge of the festivities, too shy to get up on stage, but idolizing his uncles and the music they made. John Henry Lepard remembered him as bashful. Their uncle, John Alec, once said about Albert and his brothers, Homer and Tommy, They can sing real good. If they had had an education or something to go with it, they could probably go a little distance in the music world.

Ray Edwards added his thoughts. He could really sing. One of the goodest singers you ever heared in your life … bluegrass singing.

Yeah, Jarsh and his brother Bilbo played guitar … and fiddles, Earline Lepard said, remembering her husband, Jarsh. They played for the country dances they used to have around in people’s houses, and they’d play all night.

Albert would hide under the house in a secret place to hear that fiery music.

Earline’s vivid description of the house parties prompted me to imagine that rambunctious scene:

Raspberry pie, huckleberry puddin,’ give it all away to see Sally Goodin.

The uncles kicked off their evening session. With every foot-stomping beat, gray dust sifted under the porch where Albert lay in the shadows, enthralled—soaking in every note. Jesse Dee crawled under and sat beside him, her homely cotton dress blending with the cool dirt.

Through a gap in the porch skirt, out in the freshly swept yard they could see the crowd moving to the music.

"I