The photographer and I were at the Virginia War Memorial to get a picture of the place at night for a photo essay in the Petersburg paper. It would have been peaceful if not for the talkative Capitol Police officer working that shift. There’s always that cop who wants to tell you that you wouldn’t believe what he’s seen, but then he starts telling you. I’ve never been sure why they’ll go to that trouble to tell you something they say you won’t believe, but at least this story had a point.
He had been chasing a minor criminal, a sneak thief who’d broken into a car or grabbed something he wasn’t supposed to, and the cop didn’t want to run. Instead he called out, “Hold it, Linwood.” The cop reported that the thief stopped, threw up his hands, and declared, “I ain’t him.”
The person he was claiming he wasn’t was the spree killer Linwood Briley, then at large as the leader of the largest Death Row breakout ever. The thief knew he could run from a petty larceny, in the Capitol cop’s telling, but that Linwood was shoot to kill.
The escape story dominated Virginia news for a while. During their three weeks of freedom, they were spotted fairly regularly, everywhere except at the Philadelphia garage where they were working for their uncle.
I wound up in the middle of one of those when I came out of a murder trial in Dinwiddie County one afternoon that June. The trial had been delayed, because one of the witnesses didn’t show up, so I had no story for the next day’s paper. The witness would prove useless and almost cause a mistrial when the murder was tried six weeks later, but I didn’t know that at the time. I got lucky when the deputy stopped me at the door, although I didn’t know that yet either. Becoming a reporter had put me in a world where a deputy would talk to you even when you weren’t in trouble, but I wasn’t used to that yet.
Everything was connected then, at that place, for me. The deputy worked for the sheriff, whose son had been president of the FBLA our senior year of high school. The sheriff had a collection of windup toys on his desk, and I often thought of finding a unique one for him as a gesture of good will. Some days I decided that would be unethical, and some days I just forgot. That day’s defendant was the brother of the one-time boyfriend of the sister of the woman who married my best friend from high school. I’d run against her for SCA president.
The deputy stopping me on the way out of the postponed murder trial just told me that I needed to call the newsroom. The city editor began by telling me my mother had called, and I had half the family dead in my mind before he finished by telling me the Briley brothers’ escape van had been found in Courtland.
Along 460 east of Petersburg were the towns of Waverly, Wakefield, and Ivor, names chosen from British novels by Gen. Billy Mahone, the hero of the Crater, and his wife, Otelia. They’d named the railroad stops along the line he owned, the AM&O, which he said stood for All Mine & Otelia’s. They settled on Disputanta for the one they couldn’t agree on. I lived in Waverly, and the managing editor always thought I lived in Wakefield. The city editor, who lived near Richmond, thought of the two 500-square mile counties I covered and the equally sprawling one that included Courtland as one big peanut field. In his head, Courtland must be right next door to Dinwiddie, even though it was closer to 60 miles on a map.
Not that I really minded. At 14 cents a mile, I gathered about $100 a month in mileage, in 1984 dollars. The mileage was supposed to cover gas, tires, and depreciation, so I generally turned a profit since there were few cars still on the road more depreciated than my 15-year-old Volvo station wagon with the two different colors of fender, the window that sometimes fell out, and three out of four gears working at any given time.
Those three got me to the highway outside Courtland, where my brother-in-law had an insurance route, and where I could hear the Eagles in my head. “We've been up and down this highway, haven't seen a god-damn thing,” although it wasn’t in the fast lane with that transmission. The brother-in-law would go door to door telling customers on a monthly plan that their payments had lapsed, and they’d tell him what hardship had delayed payment as implore him not to collapse their insurance. One of them had told him about the van, and he’d called my mom, and she’d called the newsroom, and the city editor had called the courthouse, but I couldn’t find the van.
I went to the sheriff’s office in Courtland anyway, hoping I’d get lucky. There should have been activity where the van had been even if it had already been moved, and there should have been something moving at the Sheriff’s Office, but in Tidewater summers nothing did unless it had to.
Just a rumor, the dispatcher explained, and that was that. An hour in court and three hours in the car and no story. Then a familiar face showed up in the room in an unfamiliar uniform wondering what I was doing so far from home.
Paul had been manager of the Dairy Queen in Waverly when I was night clerk in the 7-Eleven. I still tell people it’s the best job I ever had but I spend less time trying to explain why. Paul would come over and chat after he closed the DQ, because if it was 2 a.m. for the rest of the world it was still early evening for him. There were also the county and town cops hoping nothing would happen and wishing something would, the newspaper carriers treating their routes like military operations, the truck drivers circling the ABC store because the lot was big enough to park in, the sawmill manager who had to tell somebody, often, about the government interference with logging that had made him leave Michigan.
But it looked like Paul had left for law enforcement about the same time I did for journalism, and he shook his head and told me to hang on a minute because a reporter from Petersburg was still a little bit of a big thing in Courtland. Vernie Francis would go on to serve seven terms as sheriff of Southhampton County but at the time he’d had the job for about five minutes. Paul took me to his office and he chatted with me for ten or fifteen minutes about what it was like being in law enforcement a stone’s throw from where two of the six escapees from Death Row had been picked up in a convenience store. He told me it wasn’t just that van but every car that broke down beside the road that became cause for an alert. He talked long enough to give me a story, which I hadn’t had coming in.
I guess the story ended for me four years later when I was one of the reporters called in to witness the execution of one of the guys from the convenience store. The state had already electrocuted the rest, or soon would, and the prison was eventually closed down. The city editor went on to become PR director for the Farm Bureau in Virginia, and drove all the way to Harrisonburg once to tell me that one of the reporters working for me had won a statewide award and to invite him to the banquet, but the reporter later said he was goddamned if he was driving all the way to Richmond for an honorable mention. I don’t know what became of Paul.
The managing editor at that time was also with the United States Slowpitch Softball Association, and somebody said the USSSA license tag on his ancient rusting Cadillac stood for Unsafe Sad Sorry Automobile. He sent me to cover the opening of the association’s museum in Petersburg, and I asked the governor, there for the ribbon-cutting, a couple of questions about the Death Row breakout just to be polite. He kept waiting for another one and finally left disappointed and it turned out one of the escapees had been arrested in Vermont that day. I imagine the governor was waiting for me to ask about it, but we took it out of the Associated Press story and used it just as if I had dug up the info in a parking garage, so everybody was happy.
The story was always there, right up until the Briley brothers were arrested in Philly based on a technology so super-secret the state police didn’t want to talk about it. We call it caller ID now, but it was still new in 1984. Today we’d say the story got into the DNA of that part of Virginia, but a decade before OJ was arrested, we didn’t know what that was either. There was also some advanced phone tech at work at an empty house in the city with nothing in it but a telephone. Somebody would call the number and get scammed, but once the police raided the house and figured out it was call-forwarding to Florida, nobody was even sure if a crime had been committed in Petersburg and it didn’t have anything to do with the Brileys, so it wasn’t that much of a story.
The night Virginia electrocuted Linwood I had occasion to talk to a General Assembly member at an event in the village of Dinwiddie, as we called the area around the courthouse. He said he was against the death penalty but would never vote against it if he wanted to keep his job, but the only thing unusual about that was that he said it out loud. I didn’t use it, but it wasn’t an election year for him anyway, and by then we were all back to covering School Boards and supervisors and City Councils and car wrecks. Because the presses still had to roll and you don’t get a Death Row breakout every day.
That’s probably a good thing.