I was just a glorified adventurer who got to do things others only dreamed of…plus I got to write about it.

By Gary Green Newspaper Reporter 1970s I put my hand up against the screen door to knock, but as soon as I touched it, I pulled back with a sticky wet-paint-like goo on my knuckles. Instinctively I looked down at my hand and realized that it was not paint at all; it was still-wet blood. Moreover, I was pretty sure it was human blood and not chicken "chicken"  blood. Ok. This was real. It was not a prank call after all. I ran or skipped or leaped back down the hill to my car, reached into the glove compartment for my .38, and turned the ignition to power up my two-way radio. God, how much more simple life would have been in those days if cell phones had only existed! As soon as the radio powered up and the green light was on, I keyed the microphone, “212 to base. 10-33. 212 to base.” A “10-33” was an unnamed emergency; and 212 was my radio identification number for the newspaper communications network. It was also my telephone extension in the newsroom. No response back to me. It was after midnight on a Saturday night. The Sunday morning paper had been put to bed and everyone had gone home or out to eat a 1:00 am breakfast. Damn. At least Larry, my photographer friend, should have his walkie-talkie on. Damn. Damn. Damn. I switched the channel on the radio to the police mutual aid channel. Mutual aid was a special police frequency shared by police departments in different jurisdictions when they needed to communicate with each other. It was totally illegal for me, a newspaper reporter, to have the ability to broadcast on that frequency; but a friendly police official had installed a crystal in my radio because I had a habit of arriving at so many emergencies before the cops. This night was one of those special occasions when his decision paid off. Like many nights at the end of October or beginning of November, this Halloween night was very cold. In fact, I had put on my “McCloud” sheepskin mountain coat and was wishing for gloves. We had put the paper to bed and left the newsroom to regroup at a Denny’s-type all-night pancake house (with the unbelievably racist name of “Sambo’s”). While we waited for the car heaters to warm before pulling out, I routinely turned on my police scanner to listen to the Halloween-night prank calls that plagued police phone lines. “Hey Sarge, that guy called back again about the supposed ax murderer. You might want to cruise by that address when you have a chance. This is like the fourth time he called and he sounded too old to be another kid,” I heard a dispatcher say as he repeated the street address for the crank calls. Static-filled and crackling in the distance somewhere, barely in radio range even with the 84-inch whip antenna on the bumper of my car, I heard a response from a very tired-sounding sergeant, “I have driven by there a half-dozen times. It’s just a bunch of kids messing with us.” Something about the call sent a chill down my spine…even colder than that sheepskin jacket night. It was if a static charge made my hair stand on ends. To this day, I do not know why, but something made me take the prank calls seriously. If the cops were not going to check it out, at least I would and if nothing else, I would have a cutesy Halloween prank story for Monday’s paper. I parked at the bottom of a hill and could see light coming from the house. As I walked up the hill I could see the front door was open and only a screen door protected the house. That, alone, was pretty odd for such a cold night. It was as I knocked on the screen door that my hand encountered the bloody-looking goo. Back in the car, frantically on the radio, with the dome light on I could see that it was blood on my hand, on the cuff of my coat, and even on the brim of my cowboy hat. On the mutual aid channel I key the microphone, “This is Gary from the Gazette. I’ve got a 10-33 here at (I gave the address). This wasn’t a prank; there’s someone 10-7 here. It’s ugly. Send me some backup.” (10-7 was the police code for “out of service”, which is what cops also said for being dead.) The dispatcher working that night was a friend and a good news source for me, so he immediately responded with a fake scold, “Gary you are not supposed to be on this channel. I will send a car out. What ever you do, stay away until we get there.” I responded, “10-4” and switched back to the newspaper frequency. As soon as I was on the newspaper channel, Larry was responding from his walkie-talkie, “212, I monitored your traffic on mutual aid. I am rolling. Do not go in, under any circumstances.” I responded to him as well, “10-4.” I turned the radio off, pulled my hat tightly toward my forehead, and left the car. At the screen door I knocked again, careful not to touch the bloody area. Again, there was no response. I put my right hand into my coat pocket where I had put my pistol and even though the gun was, of course, double action, I cocked the hammer back and kept a finger on the trigger so that I could fire at the first breath of trouble. I opened the screen door and stepped inside. This door opened into the kitchen and I could see that the linoleum floor was covered with blood, mangled veins, and assorted hacked body parts. A sane person would have run the other way and waited for the police. I, however, had been on the scene of almost three dozen murders just that year; many of them before the police arrived. The body parts meant nothing to me. After having been to so many murders, an equal number of suicides, and five times that many non-fatal shootings, stabbings, and bludgeoning, I was immune. After so many human tragedies, I had developed some sort of disassociation; these were no longer humans… they were now bodies. Somehow, for me and dozens of police officers I knew, we ceased to see them as having ever been human. A truly disgustingly sick manifestation of that disassociation came one day several months earlier when I was in the Police Chief’s office discussing the weather and nothing in particular. He mentioned that he had to go to Sears to pick up two new tires for his wife’s car, and he asked if I wanted to ride along to continue the conversation. I agreed and he instructed his driver, a young rookie just graduated from the police academy, to take us to the department store. As we finished buying the tires, we walked by the old-fashion candy counter and stopped to buy half-pound of Hersey’s Kisses and a half-pound of caramel - coated peanuts. As we started back to the police station, eating the candy as we rode, the chief remember some unfinished business from a crime scene. The night before there had been a particular gruesome murder in which the killer had put a shotgun under the chin of his victim and blown the poor guys brains, literally, all over the ceiling of the hotel room where they had been staying. The room was still blocked off with police tape and the chief needed to measure the distance from the front door to the wall where the victim had been pushed. “Ever been to a murder scene?” he asked the rookie, ignoring me, knowing that I had been to more than three dozen murder scenes -many before the plice arrived. “No sir, but I always wanted to,” the young man answered as if reading the lines from a really poorly-written comedy. The three of us lifted the police tape and entered the room. I held one end of a measuring tape while the chief extended the other end to check the distance between two evidence points. The poor rookie’s eyes were hugely wide and I could see that the dried blood and bones hanging from the wall and ceiling were more than he expected or wanted to see. And I was certain he had no idea of the stench of two day-old dead human flesh. Though the body had been moved the night before, the crime scene had not been cleaned yet. The chief saw the sickness swelling from the kid’s stomach and dismissed him back to the car. After the rookie left the chief turned to me, “what a bunch of pussys they are letting out of the academy these days. I have an idea to toughen him up.” He reached to the ceiling and pried lose a piece of blood-crusted skull bone about the size of a thumbnail. We finished the measurement and walked back to the car. From my position in the backseat I could see him drop the skull bone into the caramel candy bag. As the rookie started the car the chief asked, “are you okay, son?” “Yes sir,” he answered, trying to now be more macho, “It wasn’t anything in there. I just had some bad sausage for breakfast and it has been bothering me all day.” “Hell I knew that didn’t bother one of my boys,” the chief reassured him as he patted him on the shoulder and raised the candy bag. “Here have some candy it will make your stomach feel better.” The rookie reached into the bag, took a caramel candy and ate it. The chief pushed the bag back toward the boy, “no no, you need a handful to make that tummy-ache go away.” Unsure how to resist his boss and authority figure, the young officer reached into the bag and scooped a handful of candy. And, of course, the skull bone and brain matter ended up in his hand. He looked at his hand, studied the bone for a second and tried to speak, “what is this…” Almost in the same instant that he tried to form words, he realized what he was holding. That was ALL that he held, because in the same moment whatever was in his stomach emptied all over his lap, his shirt and the steering wheel of the car. The perverse sickness of this entire incident is not just the fact that it hap-pened but is equally the fact that both the Chief of Police and I were SO amused by it. In fact we both laughed about it for days. I was barely 21 years old and already I had been to more violent death scenes than most regular police officers see in their entire careers. I had become so hardened to the violence that it really did not matter to me. Even more fright-ening, I realized that I could easily pull the trigger and take a life…or lives…and not flinch nor feel remorse. What a battle-hardened bastard I had become with-out a single day in military service during the waning of the Vietnam War. So on this particular night, stepping across body parts and pools of blood meant absolutely nothing to me. I wondered if this is how Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina had felt. An hour or so later, when the police finally arrived, I watched two seasoned detectives throw-up at the bloody massacre scene and that not even fazed me. About three months earlier, I had been bored with slow news days and had decided to write a feature story about the county jail’s drunk tank. In preparation for the story, I didn’t shave for a couple of days, dressed in old clothes, poured about a quart of bay rum all over myself, and let the Sheriff lock me in with the drunks for the night. Not unlike my friend Arlo Guthrie’s “group-W bench” from Alice’s Restaurant, I had a good old time all night talking about getting drunk and the crimes of the century with all of my cell mates.  One of those cellmates was a long-time town-drunk (of the Andy Griffith’s “Otis” variety). In his late forties or early fifties, it was easy to see that Dusty (as he was called by the other drunks) had fired his brain decades earlier. He was just one happy drunk that considered jail to be his place to sleep and get a hot meal between drinking binges. Dusty kept me company all night, was the focus of my story, and remained a “good-to-see” kind of “friend” whenever I was at the jailhouse to cover a story. On this Halloween night, as I stepped around body parts and blood puddles, Dusty and the drunk tank were the last things on my mind. I counted at least three legs and four arms, dismembered and hacked-at. I stepped over eyeballs, pieces of ears, and internal organs that were so butchered that I could not identify them. The refrigerator was near the doorway from the kitchen to the living room and it was there that most of the damage seemed to have taken place. I could clearly tell that there were two chopped torsos, decapitated and gutted. The trail of blood seemed to dwindle away toward the living room. I rounded that corner, having no idea what I might find. Sitting on the couch, as alive as me, was my drunk-tank buddy, Dusty. He had an unlit cigarette hanging from the left side of his mouth and a wooden matchstick from the right side. In his right hand was a blood-drenched double-bladed axe and at his left side was another, equally-bloody long-handled axe. He looked up at me and with no expression whatsoever on his face as he spoke, “Gary my friend, you want a drink?” I tried to stay calm, though in truth, my hand was on the trigger of my gun and if he had moved fast I would have killed him. “Dusty, man, what did you do?” He looked at me and in a very serious tone explained, “Damned bitch tried to steal my radio. What the hell would you do?” I took a deep breath, “ah, right. I see your point. So, tell me about it. What happened?” I don't know what-the-hell I was thinking to not run out the door and call the cops, but I was playing reporter. He explained to me that two years earlier he had bought an all-band radio from Radio Shack; the kind that would allow him to listen to short wave, television, and even airplanes. He had invited two close friends to his home to see the radio. One of the two picked up the radio and joked “I am going to take this home with me; it is nice.” When she did, something snapped in his brain. He slapped her and instantly her boyfriend drew a knife and sliced at Dusty. Both left in a huff. For two years he planned his revenge and finally on Halloween night he invited the couple over to let “bygones be bygones.” He told them to help themselves to a beer in the refrigerator and as the opened the refrigerator door he pounced on them with an ax in each hand. “I am fuckin’ glad I killed them and I would do it again,” he told me as he described standing over their bodies and raking the axes through them. At that moment, it occurred to me that the police would arrive soon and I was now a material witness in a capital murder case. I needed to get out of there and not let it be known that I had entered the house. The only place I had left fingerprints was on the outside of the screen door… though I had left bloody footprints everywhere. Hopefully the cops would contaminate the crime scene so badly that they would not notice my footprints. I told Dusty that the police were on the way and he should not tell them that I was there. He agreed but added, “I don’t think they will come; I done called them five fuckin’ times and they told me I didn’t kill no damned body. And I had another guy call them too. Police don’t care about Black people” I promised him that I would get them to come if, in return, he promised to forget I had been there. He agreed and I wrote my newspaper story the next day as a straight report taken from the police blotter and interviews with the detectives. I carefully left out any “insider” information. The story is all about a strange call a neighbor made to a local police sergeant who knew Dusty and didn’t believe he would kill anyone. The focus of the story is the interview with the cop; as if I had never talked to Dusty. In fact, other than to my co-workers at the newspaper, to this day (35 years later at this writing) I have never revealed my “inside” interview. And I still won a press award for the story. That is the kind of reporter I was… very hands on and in the field, even if the story could not reflect it. One night I was riding with the head of the vice squad, Andy Strain, and his plains-clothes undercover man as they were en route to arrest a major heroin dealer at his home. Strain got a call from the dispatcher to switch to the “private channel”; the channel that was on a frequency which police scanners (and hence “civilians”) could not monitor. Once on that channel, the dispatcher told the vice sergeant, “We just got a tip that the subject you are going to see is heavily armed and may launch an attack when you pull up. Do you want me to send some black-and-white (police cruisers) as backup?” Strain was sitting in the backseat, passenger side, his customary spot. Officer Floyd, his assistant, was driving and I was in the front passenger seat of the unmarked police car. Hearing the ominous warning, Strain took a deep breath and spit the juices from his plug of tobacco. The brown spit sailed across the front seat and hit the windshield where it dripped down into a waiting Styrofoam cup; the sergeant always spit is tobacco from the backseat to the windshield and into a cup. He keyed the broadcast button on his walkie-talkie radio, “Negative to that backup. We have three good men here and shotguns in the trunk. We can handle the S-O-B.” I felt my back stiffen. I looked at Officer Floyd and at Sergeant Strain and counted “one-two” and then I turned to Strain, “who the fuck is the third good man?” “Well, two of us can cover the door and a third man needs to kick in the front door,” he explained. “And the one that kicks in the door should be the worst shot, so the two good shots can cover him. Who do you think should kick the door in?” The Gary Green of today would say, “are you out of your fuckin’ mind? I am a reporter not a cop.” Actually, it would have been a more Bones McCoy like, “Damnit Jim, I am a doctor not a brick layer.” Nevertheless, at 21, I was there for the adventure and five minutes later, we had parked on a side street and were crawling on our stomachs toward the house. About 50 feet from the front porch, Strain signaled for me to jump up, run to the door and knock it open. I took a deep breath, ran the 15 yards to the wooden porch, stomped across the porch and but my weight and shoulder to the door. It didn’t budge…at all. I looked back at Strain and he signaled me to do it again. I walked to the edge of the porch and ran as fast as I could toward the door. This time I jumped into the air and kicked both feet against the door as hard as I could. Again the door didn’t budge, but I fell flat on my ass on the wood porch. Strain signaled to do it again as he and Officer Floyd began approaching the house in a crouched run. This time I gave the door the hardest kick I could, with all my weight. Once again the door stayed firm and once again I fell on my ass. By now, I had made so much racket on the porch that the occupants of the house had been alerted. The guy they had come to arrest peered through a window that opened to the porch. Seeing me there, he opened the window and stuck his head out, “Who the fuck are you?” Obviously, from looking at me, I was not a cop…and I had a long history of fucking up raids and stake-outs for Strain (even down to crunching on potato chips in a “silent” stake out). What could I do? The two cops were still out of sight and not with me yet. I reached beneath my coat and jerked out my .snub-nose 38-special and put the barrel against his forehead. I started screaming, insanely I am certain, “You are under arrest you motherfucker; make a move and I will blow your fuckin’ head off. Don’t fucking breath or you are dead.” Apparently my insanity was working, because this fool was more frightened than even I was. He did not move and barely breathed. “Please don’t shoot me. Just calm down. Don’t shoot…plllll-ease,” he whined. Tears began streaming down his face, “Don’t shoot me man, just calm down. Please don’t shoot me.” A second later, the two cops were at my side and had stepped through the window to make the arrest. I sat down hard on a padded chair on the porch. If I had been an older man with good sense, I probably would have had a heart-attack. But at 21, what-the-hell. I pulled my camera from underneath my jacket and began snapping pictures for the next day’s paper. Once again I wrote the story as if I had pulled it from a police report and had access to some really good interviews. I think I won a press award for that one also. That was my whole shtick as a journalist; getting myself into the middle of situations and allowing the readers vicariously to live out the adventures…though my life…without ever having to leave the safety and comfort of their little worlds. That is why a review of my newspaper clips shows a collection of stories like “Reporter Spends A Night In Drunk Tank”; “Reporter Poses As Blind Beggar At Shopping Mall”; “Reporter Dresses As Santa Clause and Hitchhikes On Interstate;” to the more bizarre stories like the double ax murder. In fact, in one year I arrived on the scene of 30 murders before the police arrived. And in all 30 of those, the “alleged” perpetrator was still present. I had worked out an arrangement with one of the dispatchers that if he would call me at home before he dispatched a patrol car, I would mention his name in the story as some kind of hero. A typical example would be something like: Police Dispatcher John Smith acted within seconds to prevent a second homicide by locating not only the closest officer but a nearby Lieutenant who also sped to the scene. Smith’s quick-thinking allowed police to arrest…etc. In exchange for such an in-print bribe, I would be allowed to break all speed limits, run red lights, and arrive at major crime scenes before the cops arrived. The hands-on approach happened by accident, not by plan. In fact my entire journalism career was either by accident or con; take your pick. Most of my readers, and friends, assumed that I had become a journalist at the time of Woodward and Bernstein to ape the great American heroism of the fourth estate. In 1789 Louis the 16th was planning the future of France with a committee he called the “Estates General”. The 1st estate was the church; the 2nd estate was made up of French nobility; the third estate was a congress of “commoners”. As an historian looking back on that gathering, ultra-conservative Whig Edmund Burke noted that the most important of the governmental “estates” was the unseen “Fourth Estate” —the press which would watchdog the other three gatherings of scoundrels. I should claim such noble motives; but the truth is I had gone to journalism school at the University of Tennessee because writing seemed to be the only talent I had other than music, and in my mind the two were somehow related. During my first quarter of school (in those days universities had three quarters rather than two semesters) I almost left journalism forever. The Dean of the College of Communications told me that I would never work at a newspaper because I am not disciplined enough to be a reporter. I immediately stopped taking journalism classes and spent my remaining college career organizing against the Vietnam War, for Civil Rights…and raising money and supplies for the American Indian Movement that had seized Wounded Knee South Dakota. (It was during that period that the term “gun runner” was involuntarily attached to my resume.) After my first Pulitzer nomination was accepted, I sent a copy of the acceptance letter, along with a jar of Vaseline® to the Dean, with a nice note telling him, “you probably don’t remember me, but those who CAN do; those who can NOT, teach.” With only two years (albeit too-many-credits for those years) of college behind me, my only job-experience being manager of an X-rated drive-in movie theater, I returned to North Carolina and looked up the name of the editor of the newspaper in the town where I had graduated High School. I waltzed into his office as if I had even met him (which I had not), extended my hand and said, “Mister Williams; Gary Green. You remember me! You promised that when I graduated from journalism school you’d have a job waiting for me here. So here I am. When do I start?” The next day, I was a newspaper reporter. Ten years earlier the local police department had hired, as a patrolman, a ruffian little alligator-wrestling police chief from a Louisiana swamp town of 6,800 people. They teamed him with an African American patrolman, creating the first such interracial team-up in North Carolina, and sent the two of them to calm down the angriest roughest section of the little town. The white officer, Andrew J. Strain became legendary locally for his leather-wrapped lead-filled blackjack, hot temper, and tobacco-spitting brawls. I moved to the little town for my last year and a half of high school, just as Strain had been promoted to head of the local vice squad. His visits to our school were punctuated by his Jack-Webb-like tirades on the evils of “mary-ju-wanner", “your LSD acid” and other “hard-core” drugs of the “hippy variety.” I was, in fact, one of those hippies, myself, and a frequent user of “mary-ju-wanner”, “your LSD acid,” and a host of other evils that he equally mispronounced in comical hillbilly dialect. One more than one occasion I was stopped, searched, and harassed by Strain and his goons. In the hey-day of the hippy movement, A.J. Strain and his “undercover” officers where middle-aged men with 1950s greased back hair, conservative conversation, and a dictionary of television slang for drugs (“have any reefers, daddyo?”). At one point he “arrested” (never actually charged) me and threatened to tell my parents and send me to jail unless I agreed to “narc” for him and catch “drug pushers.” I, of course, told my parents, who called the chief-of-police and told him to cut the crap. At the same time, I took $25 from the taxpayers, via A.J. Strain, bought five nickel bags of marijuana and a restaurant-size jar of oregano. I put about a fourth of one nickel bag of pot in with five times that much oregano and sold it to the cops as a “lid” I had bought from “a mysterious biker that I met at an Interstate rest area.” Free weed, at 16-years-old, courtesy of the local vice squad! Hell my friends probably thought i WAS a "narc"; but on more than one occassion I assured Strain that the target of an investigation was totally wrong. After that adventure, and his failure to make cases against anyone, I was never again called on or even stopped by Strain and company. But five years later, when I returned as a newspaper reporter, it was Andy Strain who (for whatever reason) took me under his wing and gave me complete open access to an amazing array of stories. It was indeed the same Sergeant Strain that sent me to kick in that door… as well as on dozens of other adventures of the same ilk. So on December 1st of 1975 when Sergeant Strain called me to his office, I was psyched for another adventure. “Buddy, it is no secret that I would rather ‘whup’ a man than listen to him talk. I have arrested 1,100 as of last night. And I have spent the last ten years fighting communists; they are the ones that introduced drugs to our kids to boggle the minds of our future leaders,” he told me as if setting up something important. He continued with a sudden swelling of pride, “I became a ‘POE-lice’ to help people and for the life of me, I can’t see how putting a man behind bars helps him. Gary, my heart is filled with love now and, honestly, I can’t say that I hate anybody, That’s why I’m getting out of police work and going into the Lord’s work.” Thirty-one days later Sergeant Andy Strain became Reverend Andy Strain and took over the congregation of a nearby church. He split his time between preaching and running his 40 hunting beagles through the North Carolina woods. And once again I got one hell of a fine story. Almost every story was an adventure. From shootings and stabbings to undercover investigations, to…hmmm…. One Friday evening, after everyone had left the newsroom but me, a nice woman wandered in and asked to speak to a reporter. Being such, I volunteered by services. She explained that her name was Rosalyn Carter and her husband was the Governor of nearby Georgia. She told me that he was planning to run for President. In a condescending tone that can only be mustered by cynical 21-year-old newspaper reporters and Presbyterian preachers, I patted the nice lady on the arm and asked “President of WHAT?” I assured her that the Governor of Georgia had about as much chance of being elected President of the United States as… well, as I did. Nonetheless, I called in a features reporter and facilitated a nice interview. Just about the time that Strain retired, the publisher of the paper called me into his office. “I have been reading your stories, and I know you think you are going to change the world as some kind of crusading journalist,” he began to lecture me. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. I never wanted to be a journalist, I bullshitted my way into the job, and the reality was that I was just a glorified adventurer who got to do things others only dreamed of…plus I got to write about it. Of course there were dozens, no...scores of other adventures, celebrity interviews, trips, shootings, investigative reports, government corruptions…most “above and beyond” the typical reporter fare, because of my hands-on-live-it adventure style. Hell, I often even told people that I am “a professional adventurer” rather than a newspaper reporter or a journalist. And, in truth, I had brought distinction to the newspaper for some of my stories; with very little embarrassment (other than the Chief of Police calling the Editor to report that he had seen “radical intelligence files” on my civil rights, Native American, and anti-war activities). But on this day, in the publisher’s dimly lit office with its thick red carpet, I listed to the lecture. “Let me tell you about crusading journalists changing the world,” he continued. “That is not how it works. Gary, you are a whore; a prostitute. You write what I tell you to write about. You write the length I tell you to write, in the style I tell you to write, with the slant I tell you to write. I use the product you create at my direction to sell advertising,” he continued, seemingly without breathing. “You are just a whore; my whore right now. If you don’t like that, then you are free to go sell yourself to someone else. It really is that simple. “ I was unsure what sin I had committed to bring down his wrath, but I blank-faced looked on as he ranted at me. It was not clear if I was being scolded or given fatherly advice for my future. He concluded, still without emotion, in an almost monotone, “It is nothing personal; it is just the way the world works. I wanted to have this little talk with you so that you understand that you are just a little whore and I buy and sell whores for dimes.” At that, he dismissed me to return to work. At the time it outraged me; but on “mature” reflection years later, he was, sadly, correct. But at the time it became a contributing factor to my decision to leave the newspaper... and after four more newspapers to leave journalism. The other big factor in my departure was actually the double ax murder. It was not the gruesomeness of the story nor the events. It was the fact that it did NOT bother me. If I was so battle hardened at my age, what-in-the-hell would I be like by the time I was 40? Think about that; murdered, mutilated, destroyed bodies meant nothing to me…killing meant nothing…death meant nothing. That is a dangerous and psychotic-building outlook. I got out while I could.