Mountain Xpress cartoonist Randy Molton gave my book a push. Thanks Randy!

Click here for the whole picture.

Barry Henderson, a partner with his brother James Henderson in Henderson Amusement, has been busted again for operating illegal video poker machines. Henderson Amusement was the largest of the game operators involved in the federal case against former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford. Both Henderson brothers were convicted on illegal gambling charges in 2007. James faces six years in prison and Barry was headed for a one year sentence. His sentence was reduced and incarceration delayed because he cooperated with authorities.

Now it turns out he went right back into the gambling business and was operating four Pot-o-Gold video poker machines in Burke County. The location was busted in August and he is just now facing trial. If convicted again he could face 25 years behind bars.

The most fascinating fact to emerge from the new charges is the discovery of records at the location which indicate he took in $300,000 between August 2, 2007 and August 5, 2008. That comes to $75,000 per machine, per year. While it’s true that not every location would necessarily be as profitable, if one multiplies that figure by the 520 plus machines I discovered in Buncombe County in 2005, the total approaches $40 million annually. No one reporting on these cases and none of the prosecutors involved have mentioned anything like that kind of figure in connection with video gaming in this county.

It would appear that there is a great deal of money still unaccounted for in Buncombe’s gambling racket.

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.
***
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.

Former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Monday, Oct. 6, to be followed by three years supervised probation. Judge Tim Ellis noted, “There is no parole in the Federal prison system, but if he behaves himself, he may only serve 85 percent of that sentence.” After some quick figuring, Ellis indicated that Medford will definitely be behind bars for 12-1/2 years.

All that remains to be seen is the date of Medford’s actual incarceration. He is scheduled for minor surgery, Oct. 13, and his defense attorneys Victoria Jayne and Stephen Lindsay argued that he should be permitted to undergo the operation and convalesce for ten days before being remanded to the federal prison system. Medford has a subcutaneous device implanted in his back to control pain and the surgery is aimed at adjusting the contacts to improve its function.

Ellis is considering the procedure, evaluating the ability of the federal system to undertake the treatment, and weighing the reputation of Medford’s doctor, Dr. Maxwell. Ellis noted, “There was testimony [during the trial] about Dr. Maxwell’s over-prescription of oxycontin. That concerns me.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Edwards, the lead prosecutor in the case, added, “We have concerns about Dr. Maxwell as well. In pretrial interviews with Dr. Maxwell and his wife, we learned that Bobby Medford sent Capt. Tracy Bridges down to Henderson County twice to take care of a traffic ticket issued to Mrs. Maxwell. The prosecution considered including ticket fixing in our case, but decided it was relatively minor when weighed against the other issues we were addressing.”

Ticket fixing was a frequently bandied aspect of Medford’s tenure, including the taped bragging of Medford confederate Homer Honeycutt to a police officer, “I fix more tickets than you write!”

Lindsay countered that Mrs. Maxwell had been out of town when Bridges made his forays, and was in a treatment facility “out west.” Lindsay said that Maxwell’s attorney told him that the traffic charges were dropped when the Henderson court was informed that she had voluntarily entered treatment.

Medford received his guilty verdict from a jury on May 14. His sentencing was delayed by a lengthy presentence reporting process and legal maneuvering by his defense team. He was found guilty on all 10 counts which included conspiracy to extort under color of official right (that is, using his office to garner money he didn’t deserve), mail fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to run and protect illegal gambling operations. The sentence includes eight 15-year sentences and two 5-year sentences, to be served concurrently.

As the clock ticks down to the Oct. 6 sentencing of former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford we ought to keep our ears out for the sound of falling shoes. The three month delay in the final hearing strongly suggests that a deal has been discussed. Facing a maximum of 170 years in prison, the only way Medford can reasonably hope to emerge from prison in a vertical position is to cooperate with federal prosecutors now.

I predict that if he has offered substantive testimony about criminal wrongdoing by others in WNC we will see indictments in the next two weeks—UNLESS the targets of those indictments are either elected officials currently facing election or closely connected to such officials.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Edwards, lead prosecutor in the Medford case, told me during the trial that while his department does not play politics concerning indictments, they are somewhat inclined to wait until after an election to proceed in order to avoid being accused of playing politics. If the Medford sentencing hearing is delayed another month, I confidently predict that he is about to burn someone whose indictment could affect the upcoming election. Contested offices with local ties include Court of Appeals judgeships and various county commission races.

artist's conception

Former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Lee Medford will be sentenced October 6.

On August 26, Judge Tim Ellis issued an order granting in part and denying in part Attorney Stephen Lindsay’s Motion for Extension of Time to File a response to the government’s Presentencing Investigation Report.

Then, on August 28, Ellis set the date for sentencing. It would appear that whatever bargaining Medford has done in regard to his prison term is now over. I remain convinced that other shoes are yet to drop.

Hmm. Will it be before or after the sentencing? If the government has cut him a deal they will never have more leverage than now, so it would seem that they must have at least a statement of fact from him concerning other parties. There’s no way we’ll see other trials before the sentencing, but indictments could be unsealed.

Guess we all stay tuned.

Expensive law man

To date, we the taxpayers have paid Bobby Medford’s defense attorneys $146,297. Plus copying costs, filing fees, etc. Plus, of course, the prosecution’s salaries. Not to mention the FBI agent’s salaries, or those of the IRS agents who pursued this one.

At this rate, the cost of bringing Medford to justice will soon approach the amount he extorted, diverted or outright stole from the evidence locker at the Department!

There’s still no date set for the sentencing of former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Medford who was convicted last May on multiple counts related to organized gambling. Yesterday federal prosecutors filed their Presentencing Investigation Report and attorney Stephen Lindsay immediately filed for an extension of time to respond to that report. If granted (and it is very unlikely that the extension will be denied) this will mean at least another month before the sentence is handed down.

Medford could face a total of 170 years behind bars. At the conclusion of the trial Judge Tim Ellis stated that sentencing would take place in four to six weeks. That deadline passed in mid-July fueling speculation that Medford was negotiating with the government, possibly seeking a reduced sentence in exchange for information about others involved in gambling, gun or drug rackets in WNC.

And so, the wait continues.

Asheville attorney P.J. Roth filed a complaint this week in the matter of the death of Marvis Davidson in the Buncombe County Detention Center. Davidson died of complications due to diabetes in the summer of 2004 and witnesses say she was denied treatment for her medical condition. The complaint charges the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Department with wrongful death due to criminal negligence. If Roth wins his case, the outcome would almost certainly mean a major change in liability protection for North Carolina municipalities.

I first reported on this matter for Mountain Xpress back in 2005. As I wrote at that time: “A former guard (who re quested anonymity, fearing reprisals) described having seen serious problems while working there.

Two complaints, the guard said, were filed ‘about [Marvis Davidson's] medical treatment, including failure to correctly administer insulin. And I was told by another guard that Davidson said she had severe stomach pains for four days before she died.’ the former guard said. Davidson was a diabetic, and her autopsy report says she died due to an ischemia (decrease in blood supply) and resulting hemorrhage of her small intestine. Diabetes is a contributory cause of ischemia.”

Following that story I was contacted by a former inmate who had been in an adjacent cell during Davidson’s death. She told me Davidson had been literally screaming in pain, begging for help, and that guards had not only ignored her but had told her to shut up and quit causing a disruption.

Astonishingly, Davidson had previously been incarcerated in the Buncombe County jail, had received treatment for her diabetes, and had been hospitalized from the jail during a diabetic crisis. So there is no reason whatever that the database would have lacked information in this case.

Also following my story, I was contacted by April Nicole Welch, Marvis Davidson’s daughter, who asked me if she might have some basis for legal action concerning her mother’s untimely death. I put her in touch with P.J. Roth who took up her case just days before the statute of limitations ran out. Roth opened the case a couple of years ago, and it has moved through the system in the slow way that civil cases do. Finally, this week, four years after Davidson’s death.

This was the second death at the jail in less than three years. In September 2001, Joey Max Rogers was arrested for operating his lawn mower in a drunken state. The medical examiner noted: “Arrested by B.C. Sheriff’s Dept. for drunk & disorderly — apparently was combative — placed in locked room at approximately 2100 hrs. … Checked at 2130 & found dead on floor.” Neither the medical authorities nor the Sheriff’s Department has explained how a highly intoxicated man who was also found to have a high level of phenobarbital in his blood (a legally prescribed medication, according to medical reports) had managed to break his own neck while alone in a locked room.

According to former guards who have talked to me, Rogers was thrown against a wall by a jailer. But nothing was ever done about the death.

What I’ve learned in the years since then is that North Carolina law protects municipal governments from liability in a major way and that permits jailers to do what they will pretty much without consequence.

The state law prohibits damage claims against municipalities UNLESS the municipality carries liability insurance. But IF the municipality carries liability insurance, it is given a pass on the first $500,000. That is to say if someone wins a claim for $1 million, the winner only gets $500,000. That means that attorneys are very unlikely to take cases in which damages might be less than that amount.

If you are an occasional criminal, working for minimum wage, it is entirely possible that a jury will decide that your life was worth less than $500.000, so your family could win a case and get nothing—including payment to your attorney. It’s no wonder that lawyers in this state are reluctant to take on liability cases involving municipalities, given that they may put years into litigation and come up empty handed. Roth has now been working on the Davidson case for two years and is only now moving toward a hearing.

Roth told me that he took the case for two reasons. The first is that he wants to attempt to secure justice for Davidson’s family, but the second is that he thinks the case might make “good law.” Under this state’s rules, if a public official’s failure to perform required duties is judged to be criminal, penalties are tripled which could bump any reasonable jury award above the $500,000 threshold. Roth predicts that if he wins this case Buncombe County will appeal the decision up to the state Supreme Court if necessary, and that his hope is that an ultimate favorable decision will help protect inmates statewide from jailer abuse.

As he told me, “Since I believe there are actually a bunch of well-meaning lawyers out there, a success in Marvis’ case might encourage more of them to take inmate suits across the state and thereby increase pressure on the municipalities to clean up their act.”

As I have time, I’m filling in details about the middle section of the Medford trial—for those of you who want the full scoop. If you jump to this post, then scroll down, I’ll date additions as I have time to insert them. I’m working in small town Mt. Airy this week, kind of like Asheville from an earlier era with a few modern accouterments thrown into the mix. (Maybe we could get the Asheville Chamber of Commerce to start advertising Mt. Airy instead?)