The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read online

  Except for two years in Korea during that war, Brooks had lived in Caroline his whole life, as had his father before him. He was the youngest of several children. His mother suffered bouts of severe depression and was hospitalized for it several times. She once tried to drown herself in a creek, according to family members. Perry was cared for by his oldest sister, Ellen. When Ellen married and moved away, responsibility for his mother’s care fell to him.

  In his own old age, Brooks had leased all but ten acres of his land to his son-in-law, Matthew Coleman, to farm. The chores that remained to him he carried out less by brawn than canny use of gravity. “He could do what he needed to do. It might take him three times as long, but he would get it done,” said Kim Brooks.

  In his earlier years, he sawed his own boards with a sawmill he kept in the woods. He salted herring and smoked ham with a smoker he’d built himself. He hung beef in linen bags for aging. His two daughters learned to run a grader and feed the livestock—fifty head of cattle, as well as pigs and chickens. They gathered eggs, weeded the watermelon patch. When the combine harvested the corn, the children walked the rows after, picking up scrap to grind into feed. “Nothing was wasted,” Kim Brooks remembered. “He was very old-school that way.”

  Slaughtering day at the Brooks farm was typical. Neighbors and family all helped, in exchange for meat. “It was a big mess, but we made a party of it,” said Kim Brooks. “We worked all day, and then at night there would be a barbecue, with hamburgers.”

  None of it was very profitable. “We were all half-busted half of the time,” said Bobby Lakin, Brooks’s friend and Bible study teacher, who gave up farming in favor of the electrician’s trade. “Perry could’ve sold the whole place and been a millionaire. All farmers could sell out. But that’s not your purpose in life. Perry liked farming.”

  In semi-retirement, Brooks’s chief pleasures remained what they’d always been: rabbit hunting with his beagles and daytrips for fishing in Deltaville, two hours southeast, where the Rappahannock River meets Chesapeake Bay. In winter, when farm chores eased, said Lakin, Brooks liked to sit around the fire, “smoking a pipe, laughing, and talking.”

  Still, he could square off like a bull, taunting and unyielding, when he thought he’d been wronged. Several days before he died, Brooks drove his truck over to the second house on his property to have it out with a tenant who was several months behind on the rent, according to the tenant. The tenant had recently moved his daughter’s family into the house over Brooks’s objections. Brooks was suing for the back rent. The tenant in turn claimed that Brooks owed him almost as much money for improvements the tenant had made to the property.

  Brooks drove down the driveway and blocked the tenant’s car as the man returned from work. As the two men began to shout from their car windows, the tenant’s wife and teenage daughter emerged from the house, cell phones in hand, screaming and threatening to call the sheriff. The women surrounded Brooks’s truck, and the tenant jumped out of his car, he said in an interview. Brooks, outnumbered and still behind the wheel, began to back up slowly. As he did, the women, standing behind his truck, redoubled their screaming. One jumped onto the back bumper, and the other was flung clear by her husband. The dispatcher at the sheriff’s department, mindful of the fence feud and not sure what was going on over at Brooks’s farm, sent several deputies.

  When the law arrived, the incident was over. The women complained of leg pain but drove themselves to the hospital, where no injuries were diagnosed, according to hospital records.

  Brooks was arrested, however, charged with hit and run and held for two days in the county jail. On his bail form, he listed his total cash assets at less than $1,000, put the value of his land at $1 million, and asked for a court-appointed lawyer. Kim Brooks said her father sounded abashed when she spoke to him after his release. “He said, ‘Can I just stay in jail?’” His daughter said she thought he sounded tired and unlike himself. “I remember thinking, if they could just keep him in jail for two weeks, everything would be okay.”

  IF PERRY BROOKS WAS OLD-FASHIONED by temperament and financial necessity, John Ames’s money and ambition put his farm on the cutting edge of twenty-first-century animal science. Many novice Angus breeders bail out after their first five years. But Ames beat the odds. He hired full-time farm managers and built an Angus herd that some experts rate in the top 20 percent for quality, nationwide. His bull calves have brought as much as $35,000 at sale.

  Ames, by all accounts, is a hands-on cattleman, rising at 4:00 A.M. most days to see to his herd, then leaving for his law and CPA offices in Richmond around 9:00. He shovels feed in winter and helps dip the cattle against ticks in summer.

  He was no greenhorn when he took up the country life at Holly Hill. As a child, Ames said in an interview, he spent time at his grandparents’ five-hundred-acre working farm near Newport News. His grandparents migrated to the city to work for the Navy during the Second World War, he said. Ames’s father made his living as a lawyer and accountant, but the family lived on an eighty-six-acre estate near Yorktown.

  Although some in Bowling Green see Ames as a powerful squire on the hill, in reality he seems less powerful than powerfully aspiring. His college was Norfolk’s Old Dominion University, known as a commuter school. His solo law practice is in a small gray house in a suburban office park on the outskirts of Richmond. His mother’s house in Virginia Beach was collateral for his $100,000 bail on the murder charge.

  Ames kept a low profile in Bowling Green. He was seen at the barbershop and the post office, but seldom elsewhere. He is not a member of the local bar association, and lawyers and others in the town’s small professional class say they have had little contact with him. The same is true at the Virginia Angus Association, where several former board members and employees, as well as several breeders, say Ames was seldom seen at association meetings or social events. Part of that, one association official said, might have been a simple time crunch. Ames was conducing three professions simultaneously, leaving little time, perhaps, for socializing. But an additional factor in his seeming isolation may be found in the files of the clerk’s office in Caroline County Circuit Court, where thousands of pages of filings document the ongoing saga of John F. Ames, Esq. v. the world.

  In 2002, Ames sued the giant CSX Corp. for more than $6 million, accusing the railroad of breaching his property line and damaging his fields. The case is pending. In 1999, he sued a Midwestern cattle operation, Profit Maker Bulls. The case was settled out of court. In 1997, Ames sued the Frederick, Md., company that serviced his farm silo for $100,000, accusing it of breach of contract and other offenses. That suit is pending. In 2001, he sued a former client for $87,000 in unpaid fees and other damages.

  Other times, Ames just made threats. In the mid-1990s, he threatened to sue the Virginia Angus Association over a disagreement about sales commissions, according to several association officials. In the early nineties, a state employee with business at the farm accidentally ran over one of the Ameses’ dogs while leaving the property. Ames, who was not home at the time, responded by telephoning the man late at night several times over a period of a few weeks to berate him, the state employee said, stopping only when the man threatened to call the police with a complaint of harassment. Ames demanded $100,000 in damages. The man’s personal insurance company paid a couple thousand dollars to settle the matter. (Ames did not return phone calls requesting comment on this incident or any lawsuits he has filed.)

  Sometimes Ames was the one being sued. In 1990, one of his neighbors took him to court when he refused to stop using their property as a shortcut to some of his fields. He lost. He was sued by a leading cattle magazine, Angus Topics, for refusing to pay an advertising bill. He sued back, but the magazine prevailed.

  In 1997, Ames was charged with reckless driving, obstruction of justice, and assault after a state trooper, who stopped him for making an illegal turn while driving his tractor, alleged that Ames had driven the tractor straight
at him. The charges were dismissed in a plea bargain after Ames agreed to do community service.

  Most of the several dozen people interviewed for this story—cattle breeders, former Ames employees, fellow lawyers, business associates, state and local officials—declined to comment about Ames publicly, saying they feared being sued.

  A few associates, however, defended him. “With John Ames, it’s like this,” said Tom Burke, a Midwest cattle auctioneer who is conducting a sale for Ames at Holly Hill Farm next month. “If you do what you say you are going to do, and you don’t take any shortcuts and you don’t make excuses, then everything will be fine. But if you do take those shortcuts, well, then you are going to be in for a long afternoon.”

  Farm life, perhaps, offered a respite from those pressures.

  “You can’t sue a cow,” said Saphir, the extension agent, who knew both men. “They obey orders, and they don’t challenge you.

  “Now a bull, a bull is a different story,” Saphir added. “A bull is untamable. If a bull wants to go somewhere, it’ll go.” That, he speculated, could be part of a deeper, psychological truth behind the shooting death of Perry Brooks. “Here [Ames] is, this hugely respected Angus breeder, and some guy’s mangy old bull comes over and breeds with two or three of your heifers?…It’s like your daughter got raped.”

  J. Benjamin Dick, Ames’s co-counsel in the upcoming murder trial, said people underestimate the threat that Perry Brooks posed. Brooks was old, Dick said, but don’t be fooled. He was strong, with forearms “like Popeye.”

  “I think Perry Brooks was at the farm that morning to do great harm—there’s no doubt in my mind,” said Dick.

  In the aftermath of the shooting, before lawyers and the county prosecutor had been allowed to examine the physical evidence in the case, Dick said that Brooks had gone to Holly Hill Farm on the morning of April 19 armed with an electric cattle prod. But after a preliminary hearing at which the rumored cattle prod turned out to be what Dick described later as a “half-broomstick,” he seemed to backtrack.

  “It’s a tough case,” he said. “No doubt about it, it’s a tough case.”

  IN ROBERT FROST’S POEM “Mending Wall,” the narrator laments a farmer who wants to build a fence between the narrator’s apple orchard and the farmer’s stand of pine. A fence is hardly necessary, Frost’s narrator thinks. After all:

  There where it is we do not need the wall:

  He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

  My apple trees will never get across

  And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

  But in the poem, the laconic New England farmer seems to know better: “He only says, ‘Good fences make good Neighbors.’”

  But fences create conflict, too.

  “Fences, it’s always fences,” said Cora Jordan, a lawyer and author of an authoritative guide to the area of jurisprudence known as neighbor law. Complaints about noise are the most common problem between neighbors, she said, but fence conflicts are the most likely to spiral into physical violence. “Judges can’t stand these cases,” Jordan said. “Lawyers don’t want to take them, and law enforcement doesn’t want any part of it.”

  “I get lots of phone calls about fences,” agreed Leon Geyer, a law professor specializing in agricultural law and environmental economics at Virginia Tech. “It’s a very hot subject.” Since Brooks’s death, Geyer has been in demand by farmers eager to educate themselves about the intricacies of Virginia’s fence law.

  Most states require that cattle owners fence in their livestock. Virginia is one of only three states, with Arkansas and Oregon, where responsibility for fencing changes by county, Geyer said. In some rural counties in the commonwealth, the burden is on farmers to fence the neighbor’s cattle out. Elsewhere, as in Caroline, cattle farmers bear the responsibility to fence their herds in. In both settings, however, the fence law, until recently, dictated that the cost of fencing would be shared. In January, Virginia’s General Assembly, chastened by the Brooks slaying, amended the fence law to exempt landowners without livestock from the burden of paying for a neighbor’s cattle fence. The change would not have affected Brooks, a cattle owner.

  (In most of Virginia’s suburban counties, the “pay half” provision is superseded by local regulations, Geyer said. But in other parts of the country, according to Jordan, even suburban neighbors often are liable for the construction and maintenance costs of their shared fence lines.) Some state legislatures have tried to head off problems by writing laws that dictate fence wire gauges and post diameters. Virginia’s law does not do this.

  Every neighbor dispute is different, Jordan said, but often the two principals in a long-running feud are “two extremely stubborn people,” neither of whom is willing to take a first step that professional mediators call “unilateral deescalation.”

  Translation? “Choosing to do nothing when it is your turn to do something extremely nasty,” Jordan said.

  IT WAS EMBRYO-FLUSHING DAY at Holly Hill Farm, and John Ames had agreed to let me on the property for a visit. Ames had declined all media contact since the shooting, but in a brief conversation about cattle breeding outside the courtroom before his preliminary hearing, his lead attorney, Richmond defense lawyer Craig S. Cooley, by his side, Ames had volunteered that he thought the cattle business was on the eve of a revolutionary leap forward, a day when cattle breeders might produce enough cattle, at a low enough price, to end world hunger. If there was one thing that bothered him, Ames added, it was the thought of children starving in a world of abundance.

  He also had an unusual, wired energy that day. John Ames is small-boned, of medium height—five feet ten inches, according to court records—but he has the lean build of a marathon runner and appears younger than his sixty years. His skin that day was ruddy from outdoor work, and his salt-and-pepper hair was shorn close to the scalp. His bright blue eyes blazed with an expression both inquiring and imperious, and his voice had the mild twang of his native Tidewater.

  With Cooley’s blessing, Ames was willing to allow the visit, on one condition: There were to be no questions about the shooting, the feud, or Perry Brooks.

  Holly Hill Farm is a big piece of real estate. Its rolling hills run alongside Route 207, just outside the town limits of Bowling Green, for a good mile and a half, until the property ends at the low-lying highway bridge that spans the Mattaponi River. The farm’s main entrance is flanked by two formal brick pillars, and the long driveway—a half-mile or so—is paved in rough-cut gray gravel. The drive cuts through a sweeping bowl of open pasture. In the fields, large, ink-black rectangles of cattle stand motionless except for an occasional shake of a massive, ear-tagged head. Up at the house, the only sign of life is one red horse in a paddock and the sound of barking dogs coming from behind the house’s tall front windows and thick white columns.

  On the first of two visits, Ames appeared in a long-sleeved dress shirt and suit trousers, having come straight from his office in Richmond. He led a tour of the barn area, and talked about his love of farming. “Once it gets in your blood, it never leaves you. And you have to do it for love,” he added, chuckling, “because there’s no money in it.” He opened a gate and called to four of his prize-winning cows. “Come on, girls,” he said, and stopped to scratch one on the back.

  Ames’s specialty is bankruptcy law, which tends to attract people who enjoy crunching numbers. During my visits, he displayed a keen command of the statistical side of his cattle operation, explaining the intricate spreadsheets by which serious breeders track data such as intramuscular fat ratios and weight gain. He rattled off his top cows’ eight-digit identification numbers with the ease of a man reciting his phone number, and in a small workroom, he unscrewed liquid nitrogen tanks where bull semen was stored in plastic straws as narrow as swizzle sticks, each painted with tiny numbers.

  On the table there was a DNA sample kit that would take tissue scrapings from the ears of two of Ames’s best females and be mailed to a lab in Iow
a for storage until the price of cloning comes down. Artificial insemination is commonplace in the cattle business. DNA sampling for future cloning, however, is not, and the kit identifies Ames as a serious player in the breeding game, as does the practice of treating genetically desirable cows with fertility drugs so they produce multiple, rather than single, embryos.

  On the morning of my second visit, dozens of such embryos were to be “flushed” from four cows with the help of saline solution, plastic tubes, and a fertility specialist vet who was driving down from Pennsylvania. The embryos were to be stored briefly, until they could be implanted into recipient cows that would gestate them to birth. As he waited for the vet, Ames, his hair unbrushed, looked cheerful and relaxed. He was dressed in worn bluejeans, scuffed boots, and an old red sweater. Once the vet arrived, the two men, with the help of a farmhand, began herding the cows, one by one, into a metal squeeze chute. For the next several hours, as the vet worked, Ames kept up a stream of cheerful conversation about his visits with some of the cattle industry’s top scientists and his contacts with senior executives at the country’s largest meat-packing plants.

  At one point, with the vet’s right arm buried up to the shoulder in a cow’s reproductive canal, and Ames’s own arms draped with plastic tubes attached to sacs of saline solution, Ames explained the packing industry’s plans for “vertical integration,” for expanding its business from the slaughter and packing to include cattle breeding. “We want to take ’em from squeal to meal!” Ames said approvingly, quoting an executive from Smithfield Foods.

  Throughout the morning, he told stories about successful cattle shows, mentioning a man who, when I telephoned him later, painted a bleaker picture. “John had a couple of [cattle] sales in the past where nobody showed up,” said John Hausner, a herd manager who has worked for Ames in the past. “Obviously, he’s made somebody mad. I felt sorry for the man.”