Here’s the first chapter of my new book. It describes the event that first drew me into following the career of the former Buncombe County sheriff.
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Pure Bunkum: Reporting on the Life and Crimes of Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford
by Cecil Bothwell
Brave Ulysses Books, 2008

1: Nothing happened

The patrol car kicked up loose gravel as it climbed the steep driveway that led to a smoke blue mobile home. When the engine died, a deputy sheriff climbed out and walked toward an ambulance crew already on the scene. The two EMS workers were conversing with a young woman whose small daughter clung to her leg. As the officer approached the group, another male figure started up the drive on foot.

“Nobody home,” one of the medical crew members reported.

“Did you go in?” the deputy queried.

“Locked tight. And we figured there could be trouble,” came the reply. “She told us the victim drove away.” He gestured toward the woman. “And the boy-friend, too. But we figured we should wait for you.”

The fellow coming uphill called out, “I own this place! Some kind of trouble?”

The deputy was noncommital. “Maybe so.”

“She was hurt pretty bad,” the woman offered. “She ran down to my house. She was bleeding.”

Two more cruisers came up the road. One circled and the two parked belly to belly, blocking the drive. The drivers’ windows were open. Neither deputy emerged.

The landlord had joined the group. “Some kind of trouble?” he repeated.

Offering little, the deputy demurred. “Could be.”

The woman spoke again. “She drove off in her car. He went off with some men in a truck.”

“Locked up tight,” added the EMS driver.

The deputy accepted a key offered by the landlord and assured the group, “I’ll take care of it from here.” He spoke into a radio clipped on his shoulder and ambled to a weathered set of wooden steps. climbing to the landing. He knocked a rapid staccato on the door and waited. Again. No response. He turned the key and opened the door a few inches.

“Anybody here?”

Glancing down at the interior knob he noted brownish smeared stains, and called again, “Anybody home?” He pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, swung the door open and stepped inside.

A smashed mirror hung askew on the opposite wall and thick shards of glass protruded from the paneling. The shards matched what remained of a coffee table top that bore the same red-brown smudges as the doorknob. Lamp shades were smashed flat, and the fluted glass globe of an overhead light lay broken in a dozen pieces. A dark hand print on the front wall caught his attention and, as his gaze swept the room, he saw a tee-shirt, shorts, a brassiere, a couple of towels and curtains pulled halfway from the rod, all with similar stains.

He followed a bloody swipe down the hall, four fingers had trailed across pale paneling to the bedroom door. Inside that room the bed was canted with its lower legs broken to the floor. Torn sheets were tied to the bedstead, head and foot, and shared the same telltale smears. The bedside table was piled with prescription pill bottles which had spilled onto the floor. Others were visible beneath the bed. A closer look showed that the bottles bore the names of four different patients all ordered up by the same doctor.

Oxycontin.

In the bathroom, the toilet tank lid had been smashed across the base. Brown spots on the dry porcelain faded into pinkish water in the bowl. The mirror above the sink was shattered in a starburst. A few stray hairs stuck to the glass suggested that the battering ram had been a human head.

Walking back up the hall the deputy noted brown spots on the vinyl flooring and more pill bottles in the kitchen where he picked up a purse and cell phone. He left by way of the door where he’d entered, pushing the button so the door locked when he clicked it shut. He stripped off his gloves, and returned to the waiting EMS crew.

“You’re right. Nobody home,” he said. “This purse must belong to Sherlin, will you give it to her?” He handed it off to the landlord and spoke to the emergency crew. “Nothing happening here.”

The ambulance and the other sheriff’s cars headed off as the deputy returned to the cruiser to fetch a roll of crime-scene tape. He tied yellow “Police Line” streamers across the trailer’s front and back porches and then returned to his regular patrol, reporting completion of his assignment to the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department dispatcher as he pulled out onto Old Leicester Highway.

The transcript of that call is dated 10-01-02, 1:16 p.m.

“RESIDENCE WAS VACANT//LANDLORD MET WITH US TO ALLOW ENTRY. SPOKE TO FEMALE ON PHONE AND SHE REFUSED TO GIVE HER LOCATION TO MYSELF OR EMS. FEMALE SOUNDED INTOXICATED ON THE PHONE. NO SIGNS OF ASSAULT IN RESIDENCE RE INJURIES THOUGH NEIGHBORS STATE SHE RAN TO HER HOUSE WITH VISIBLE INJURIES. NO STATEMENT MADE TO ASSAULT.”

It’s unclear from the transcript exactly who made “no statement,” presumably the missing victim. The transcript of another communication with the dispatcher, an hour earlier, stated:

“UNIT 1 OFFICE HAS BEEN ADVISED THE SHERIFF SON THE COMPLT WAS ASHELY WILLIAMS AT 8 MINK FARM ROAD SHE ADVISE THE FEMALE WAS BLEEDING FROM THE HEAD BUT SHE DID NOT KNOW HER NAME SHE ADVISE THAT THE MALE WAS THE SHERIFF SON.”

Minutes later a call came in from another car:

“THIS WAS JEFF MEDFORD THE SHERIFF SON AFTER CALLING COMPLT BACK THE NUMBER IS 7 MINK FARM RD EMS COULD FIND THE PATIENT.”

The radio transcript notwithstanding, when Buncombe County Emergency Services had arrived at the trailer, at 12:23 p.m., there was nobody home. They COULD NOT find the “patient.” EMS had responded to Williams’ phone call in which she reported that her neighbor had burst into her home bleeding and bruised, claiming that her boyfriend, Jeff Medford, had beaten her. She told the operator, “She has blood coming from her head, her throat and stuff is cut, and she’s got bruises all over.”

Williams later told me that she had heard her young daughter screaming. She hurried up the hall to find a woman standing in her living room. She told me the stranger was bleeding from her head and neck, and was bruised and battered. The stranger pulled up her clothing to reveal more injuries and said, “He’s been beating me for three days.”

Although the transcript is date-stamped at 1:16, other BCSD documents indicate that no deputy arrived before 1:53 p.m. Meanwhile a second incident involving the “patient,” Nisha Gail Sherlin, was clocked in by the Woodfin Police department at exactly 1:53. That accident scene, in Woodfin, is a twenty minute drive from Mink Farm Road, even for a woman in a hurry.

Sherlin was in a hurry.

Leaving Williams’ home, Sherlin had run back up the hill to her trailer. Addled from days of drugging and beating, she had escaped her bonds while Jeff was away, but now she was desperate to leave the scene before he returned. She jumped into her Volkswagen Rabbit and sped away, careening along back country roads and New and Old Leicester Highways. I would later learn she had picked up a friend, returned to the trailer, gone to her mother’s home, dropped off the friend—somewhere—and raced on to the intersection of Elkwood Avenue and Lakeshore Drive where she shot past a red light and rear-ended a Hummer.

The Rabbit was totaled.

According to the official accident report, Sherlin leaped from her vehicle and pounded on the door of another car stopped at the light. Sherlin would later explain to me that she was desperate to get away. Given the close relationship between her boyfriend’s father, Sheriff Bobby Medford, and the Woodfin police, that police department didn’t represent anything that looked like help to her. Whereas the driver of the car she had approached regarded her behavior as assaultive, Sherlin said she was begging for a ride.

The Woodfin accident report noted, “No injuries to either party.” However, an ambulance was summoned, and Sherlin was packed off to St. Joseph’s Hospital, just south of downtown Asheville.

The odd coincidence of time on the two reports might or might not suggest collusion, as might the police report of “no injuries,” whereas Sherlin had left her neigh-bor’s home with blood running from her head.

But the record was about to become stranger still.

Soon Sherlin lay in bed surrounded by a medical team. They had treated her wounds, some of which were fresh, and had taken careful note of her condition, all while attempting to calm her down. A deputy had been dispatched to the hospital and a report of the officer’s first interview with Sherlin indicates that the patient was extremely confused and probably drugged. In the space on the form labeled, “How Attacked or Committed,” the deputy wrote, “suspect kicked females legs.”

In the body of the report one reads, “Victim advises she was assaulted by suspect last night or the night before when she got into an argument with suspect. Victim believes it to be possibly Sunday [it was Tuesday] and advises she slept for 2 days on the bed without the frame; victim advises the frame was there before. Victim believes suspect drugged her but did not see him give her anything. Victim advises at some point suspect kicked her legs with steel toe boots and hit her in the head, she also believes suspect cut her neck and hand with a piece of glass but she doesn’t know where the glass came from.”

The deputy also noted, “Victim was transported to St. Joseph’s after being involved in a motor vehicle accident,” and reported that she took photos of the injuries.

Then the reporting officer requested the assignment of Deputy Brenda Fraser to the case.

The request made sense because Fraser was the domestic violence Victim’s Assistance Coordinator at the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department. But the request was strange in another way. Medical records would later come to light that indicated Deputy Fraser had arrived at the hospital before Sherlin and that Fraser had actually conducted the initial interview. The report was, at best, inaccurate.

“Inaccurate” would come to feel like a very generous interpretation. “Fraudulent” seemed more apt.

As I would come to understand in ensuing months, the law enforcement agency paperwork was an after-the-fact addition bearing no certain correlation to events in the real world.

In a region with a reputation for crooked lawmen, Bobby Medford is that rare exception: caught and convicted. He was dealt a fifteen year sentence in the federal prison system for conspiracy, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud and illegal gambling. But that’s just part of his story. Bounty hunter, debt collector and addict, he left behind a trail strewn with guns, drugs, bodies and cash. Pure Bunkum offers a reporter’s-eye view of the way public corruption proliferates, even when “everyone knows” what’s going on, told by an award-winning journalist with an eye for the absurd.

To order a copy, click here or on the cover picture in the right sidebar.

I’ve launched my mini-book tour. Friday I spent the afternoon at Touchstone Gallery in Hendersonville, chatting with a steady stream of folks. Members of Women in Black dropped in after their weekly peace vigil at the old Henderson courthouse, and old friends and new readers came by as well.

Saturday evening about 75 folks came to the reading at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café in Asheville and not only listened to my spiel but stayed to ask probing questions and discuss my effort.

Thanks to both venues and all of you for coming around to launch this work. I am excited to share this, the biggest research and writing project in my career, and I’m humbled by your support and kindness. Today, on to Charlotte!

As a micro-publisher, I get offered far more books than I can possibly put into print. But sometimes it is simply impossible to say “no.” Jerry Pope’s picture book is one of those. What can I say? I would love it even if I hadn’t published it.

This is the story of a little girl who wished for a little dinosaur companion, beautifully drawn, sweetly told. Ask for it in your favorite indie book store, order it from Brave Ulysses Books or find it at an online retailer. You’ll be supporting a WNC artist, a WNC publisher and a U.S. printer. And your child will love the story as well as the coloring section at the back.
Madeleine Claire and the Dinosaur
Brave Ulysses Books, 2006
Hardcover. $16.

My Graham bio is featured in this week’s edition of The Beat (Greenville, S.C.). I’m particularly gratified that Editor James Shannon offered a reasoned analysis of the Mountain Xpress review by Seth Dowland.

The issue includes a full chapter from my book as well, wherein I detail the “Jew” conversation that started me into the biography in the first place.

I’ll be making appearances at Touchstone Gallery in Hendersonville, Friday, Nov. 16, 1 p.m; at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Cafe, Asheville, Saturday, Nov. 17, 7 p.m.; and at Park Road Books, Charlotte, Sunday, Nov. 18, 2 p.m. Other events listed here.

This is my first big book release and, honestly, it is exciting as the dickens. Have an interview on a Philadelphia radio station, Tuesday, Nov. 20.

David Lynch, of Lynch Graphics, has redesigned the cover of my forthcoming biography. Yowza!

For a complete itinerary of my upcoming regional tour, click here.

Mountain Xpress has published a dual review by Duke University teacher Seth Howland. Howland took a look at my book side-by-side with The Preacher and the Presidents, a new offering from Time magazine writers Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy. (Read my review of their book here.)

While Howland, an evangelical Christian, gives predictable credit to Graham’s putative “good works,” and has strong disagreements with my take on Graham’s later career, I think the review is largely a fair one. The only specific complaint I would offer is his use of the word “specious” to describe some of my sources. Wrong. I may or may not have overlooked exculpatory evidence, but my sources are all academically solid.

An example of our different takes: Howland sees Graham’s entry into the Soviet Union over Ronald Reagan’s objections as an example of the minister taking the moral high ground. I see it as opening a new market. In essence, all of the good ascribed to Graham comes down to belief that his beliefs are valid. To my way of thinking he has profited enormously from selling an untestable hypothesis.

But I am, notwithstanding specific quibbles, humbled by the seriousness with which my work is being considered now that it is out in the world. As Howland fairly concludes:
“Even so, The Preacher and the Presidents and The Prince of War render a valuable service. By providing conflicting accounts of a life lived in the public eye, these two books reveal the fundamental difficulty of biography. If the authors have failed to offer perspective on every aspect of Graham’s career, they nonetheless move conversations about his legacy forward.”

Who could ask for anything more?