Desperate for Love movie

2009-05-05T17:43:00.001-07:00

Tammy Nance aka Tammy Glissen

2009-05-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

2009-05-05T17:18:00.000-07:00

Steve Vance Brown Faulkner High School

2009-05-05T17:10:00.000-07:00

Mike Miskelley Photos

2009-05-05T16:11:00.000-07:00

Sad Song From the Hills (Memphis Magazine)

2009-05-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

Originally published in December, 1985

This is the tale of a murder that occurred almost five years ago in the rusty hills of northern Mississippi. It is the account of a boy sentenced to life in prison for shooting a close friend in the heat of jealousy over a shared high-school sweetheart. It is the story of how a quiet community of 255 country folk became bitterly and even violently divided. It is a foray into a closed world where justice is often circumscribed by conflicting rumors, old family grudges, and the vagaries of Mississippi politics. It is a love story with a plot as tangled as the kudzu and honeysuckle that mesh so prolifically with the hill country here. It is the story of the most dramatic homicide case ever to have come out of this rural area around Holly Springs National Forest, a case that has dragged on for years and only this fall finally came to the attention of the state Supreme Court. Most of all, it is a murder mystery whose unanswered questions will linger for years to come, whatever the final verdict...

ECHOES OF YOKNAPATAWPHA

It is just over an hour's drive from Memphis, and yet life in Falkner, Mississippi, appears strangely distant. Driving along State Highway 15, one gets the sense of having slipped into a self-contained world. One cannot help but feel like an interloper in some ancient linking of time and place. "You go back into those hills," one Oxford attorney insists, "and you go back a hundred years."

The overgrown hills around Falkner are interrupted by low-slung farmhouses or trailers set back in the hollows and alongside creek beds. Many of the lots are cluttered with ramshackle woodsheds, and occasionally one can spot an old engine crankcase shimmering in the weeds, or a pull-start lawnmower, or a rusted-out tricycle turned on its side. Dingy sheets and patchwork quilts flutter on clotheslines strung up between the loblolly pines. Geraniums sprout from the hubs of used tires coated with white spray paint. The tin roof of an old collapsed barn exhorts drivers to "See 7 States From Rock City."

The undersides of pickup trucks are spattered with auburn earth. Along the highway, an elderly woman in a sundress creeps across the road to the row of mailboxes for her copy of The Southern Sentinel, the weekly newspaper printed in nearby Ripley. Toddlers in cutoff jeans slither and laugh in the mud by the ranch-style house with the handpainted sign in the yard that says, "BAIT." Often there are coon hounds wandering along the shoulders of the roadside ditches, yelping at strangers in the sultry noon heat.

The town of Falkner derives its name from the same Scotch-Irish family that produced the great novelist. (Back in the Twenties, William Faulkner added the "u" as a literary extravagance.) Faulkner's great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, settled in the area around 1842. A Confederate colonel and a flamboyant trial lawyer, Falkner was passionate, violent, impulsive. He first made a name for himself at the age of 18, when he interviewed a convicted murderer in the local jailhouse the night before the man was to be executed. Falkner rushed his lurid account of the crime to a printer the same night, and made a bundle the next day selling copies of the murder story at five cents apiece to the hundreds who had gathered for the public hanging in the courthouse yard. Later in life, he gained notoriety for his turgid romance novels, such as The White Rose of Memphis.

Colonel Falkner was called, by turns, a great statesman, an incorrigible braggart, a Southern gentleman, and a cold-blooded murderer. He was also a fast-talking promoter, and he single-handedly arranged for a new railroad to be routed through the area in 1872. For a short while, the town that bore his name enjoyed a boom as a small-time cotton and transportation center.

But that has all changed. The local population has dwindled over the past century, a consequence of agricultural mechanization, depleted soils, and the declining importance of the railroad. Though the l and is not rich enough for much farming anymore, the residents still plant milo and cotton and soybeans. Most people scratch a living from the ground however they can. Some raise gamecocks or pit dogs; others cut timber.Narcotics officials say some of the outlying fields are covered with marijuana. "Wacky-backy," as some of the locals call it, is rumored to be the principal form of income for a number of prominent citizens in the area.

The modern town of Falkner, is scattered across a few dozen gulches and ravines, where the north and south forks of Muddy Creek merge. It is in the middle of Tippah County, one of the poorest

and least populous in the state. Driving along Highway 15, one can see a red brick high school, a Gulf station, a feed mill, and a yellow-and-white water tower with the town's name painted in square black letters.

But Falkner isn't exactly a town in the geographical sense. more accurately, it's simply a stretch of countryside-a series of hills, a pocket of houses, a crossroads, a swath of fragmented images seen from a truck or a school bus. The people of Falkner are spread across a ten-mile landscape, living along the dusty gravel roads that course through the country. It might easily be three or four miles to the nearest neighbor's door. Because of this, affairs in Falkner often seem tentative, unresolved; the people do not see each other. Life is lived in clans and clusters. Public grievances are seldom confronted out in the open. Grudges fester, suspicions flourish, and the stories people tell take on a life of their own- much more so than in a snug little town with a barber shop or a beauty parlor, where every day's rumors get tested and refined.

People in Falkner live close to their impulses, just as they did nearly a century ago, when an unknown local author penned what he called the "governing code" of Tippah County. "A man ought to fear God and mind his own business," the writer declared. "He should be respectful and courteous to all women; he should love his friends and hate his enemies; he should eat when he is hungry, drink when he is thirsty, dance when he is merry, vote for the candidate he likes best, and knock down any man who questions his right to these privileges."

HUNTING BUDDIES

It was March of 1981, and Steven Vance Brown was something of a golden boy at Falkner High. He was a tall and athletic sophomore, with a swirl of blond hair brushed back in waves and plaintive blue eyes that made the girls pass notes in class. There was only one flaw: he wore orthodontic braces to correct a pronounced underbite.

Steve worked Saturdays at the Tropical Seasons nursery off Highway 15, and played three sports. He performed in the "gifted" singing group at the school, and sang in the church choir. His music teacher at school that year, Pete Doles, arranged for him to appear on a wake-up television show in Tupelo one morning, where he sang a little number called "A Sad Song." ("I know that life goes on perfectly/and everything is just the way it should be/still...sometimes I feel like a sad song/like I'm all alone without you.")

Steve wanted to enroll at Mississippi State in Starkville after high school. One day he hoped to be a successful large-animal surgeon. It was only natural that he was an active member in Future Farmers of America, the largest organization at Falkner High School. Steve's father, Dwight Brown, was the agricultural instructor. In fact, the Brown family lived beside the school in a modest brick house, from which Mr. Brown- a taciturn man with a sun-baked face- could watch over the vocational ag-shop.

So Steve grew up in the heart of Falkner. He was the All-American kid, the community's favorite son from one of its most visible families, surrounded and shaped by the school all his life.

Grown-ups may have thought of him as a saint, but to his Falkner peers, Steve was an ordinary country boy who romped and partied with everyone else. After all, in Falkner there really wasn't much else a youngster could do but hunt and drink beer. The latter pastime wasn't easy, however, for Tippah County was dry and there were Baptist teetotalers who seemed to keep an eye on everything.

But Steve and his friends managed. They bought beer from an old bootlegger in neighboring Benton County. Then they would cruise the streets of Ripley or meet at the Pizza Hut. Sometimes they would have parties on Saturday nights at the edge of some secluded milo field, where they'd park their cars close together and turn up Memphis' Rock 103 on the car stereos. These were the times when Steve and his football buddies in their letter jackets would wrestle and sing; the couples would neck in the shadows; and the raspy voice of a dj named Red Beard would dance on the airwaves out of the Bluff City, and vanish with the songs of the katydids into the Mississippi hills.

-

Steve hung around with a Falkner High junior named Mike Miskelley. They played football together. Though close friends, theirs was an attraction of opposites. Mike was the high-school clown, a kind of buffoon tramping around the halls. He was small and agile and witty, with a suspicious grin creeping across a face that glowed with freckles and adolescent mischief. He was lucky number seven

on the football team, a cornerback. He had straight red bangs that edged across his forehead in a perfectly even line. Except for one late night when a cop caught him skinny dipping with two others at a swimming hole in Booneville, Mike seemed to scurry like a leprechaun from one stunt to the next without getting caught. This was why Mike's folks nicknamed him "Slick"; though he was an incurable prankster, he could always fast-talk his way out of trouble.

Steve and Mike were hunting buddies. They hung out on lazy afternoons, listening to Mike's one Lynyrd Skynyrd tape, and shooting at anything that moved. "Hunting in Falkner just means a bunch of kids driving around the place with shotguns," explains a classmate. "There isn't anything else to do. You might hunt possum, coon, beaver, turtles. But usually you was just out hunting for something to pass the time."

On the afternoon of March 23, 1981, Mike and Steve planned to go out hunting for the first time in a long while. There had been something of a grudge between the two boys, and they had only recently decided to reconcile their differences...

-

The rift had to do with a girl. Impetuous, dreamy-eyed, desirable- Tammy Glissen was known at FHS as a romantic who wrote love poems. She was short and pert, with sandy blonde curls. She had the sturdy legs of a practiced cheerleader, and could turn flips and cartwheels without a thought. She played basketball for the Falkner Eaglettes. In the summer she would tan to a dark brown, and her hair would bleach out. There was an emotional charm about her that attracted most of the boys. She had a reputation for being friendly and not a little forward, with a mercurial temperament. "She could turn on the tears at the snap of your finger," says Reggie Jones, a classmate. "And they was real live tears, too. The next second she could be all smiles again, like nothing ever happened."

Tammy and Steve Brown had been dating periodically for two years. Many of their friends believed that they had actually become engaged that winter. Tammy herself called it "pre-engaged," a status of amorous affairs which one Falkner classmate described as "not buying a ring, but just sorta looking at them."

Whatever the case, Steve's folks hadn't exactly approved. After all, Steve was only 15. He had plans to go on to veterinary school. The Browns thought Tammy was distracting Steve from his studies. They didn't want to see their son's grades suffer over a frivolous high-school romance. And, as the agriculture teacher, Mr. Brown wanted his son to set an example at the school. So they told Steve to stop seeing so much of Tammy.

To make matters worse for Steve, Tammy had been seeing some of Mike Miskelley. Mike visited over at the Glissen home quite often between Christmas and March. Yet Tammy's friends claimed she wasn't genuinely interested in Mike, just fooling around with him to make Steve jealous. "She didn't have anything to do with Mike unless Steve was around," recalls one of Tammy's best friends, Tammy Garrett. Still, Steve had no way of gauging Tammy Glissen's motives. He was hurt by her disloyalty, especially since the other boy happened to be one of his closest friends.

Perhaps this accounted for Steve's moodiness over the few weeks before his hunting outing with Mike. Steve's friends say he acted "spacey." They say he seemed distracted, troubled, forgetful. Others noticed he often fell asleep during classes. His grades plummeted. It was said he ignored his buddies and went "girl crazy." Sometimes he didn't show up for work. Reggie Jones, a classmate who worked with Steve at the Tropical Seasons wholesale nursery, said Steve couldn't keep his mind on his work. Their boss, Jim Wohlfarth, even called the Browns to express his concern about Steve's behavior on the job.

So on Monday afternoon, March 23rd, when the boys planned the hunt, Steve was not exactly his old self. Nevertheless, it seemed the friendship had been repaired. The two boys were speaking again. As a token of the reconciliation, Mike decided to give Steve one of his family's new bullpups. The Miskelleys raised pure-bred bulldogs, and Mike knew Steve was fond of them.

The same day, Tammy and Steve had announced that they were back together again, though this time they had decided "just to date." They even had plans for that evening; they were going to Corinth with friends. Steve wanted to buy a pair of shoes at Lonnie's Sporting Goods.

Two days earlier, on Saturday, March 21st, they had spent the afternoon together in Memphis, along with most of their high-school friends. A yearbook photographer snapped a shot of the two

standing before the polar bear caves at Overton Park Zoo, a picture that would be featured in the Who's Who section of the annual. Tammy Glissen and Steve Brown were named Most School Spirited.

FADING IN THE MIRROR

Mike arrived at Falkner High School around 4:15, after Steve's Monday afternoon baseball practice. Mike was driving his light-blue 1972 Gran Torino. He had to brake and accelerate with his left foot, because he'd seriously injured his right leg during football practice the previous fall, and was still wearing a clumsy plaster cast.

Steve was waiting by the steps at the south end of the school, chatting with a teammate named Dwayne Hopkins. He was wearing lace-up boots, a rodeo cap, denim jeans, a maroon sweatshirt, and a red coat with a patch advertising "Wayne's Feed Company." Slung over his shoulder was his rifle, a bolt-action .22 Mossburg.

Steve hopped in. He laid his rifle next to Mike's 20-gauge double-barrel shotgun on the back seat. They said goodbye to Dwayne Hopkins, and headed out Highway 370, toward the woods that lay between Falkner and Ashland.

-

Twenty minutes later, Dwight Brown walked behind his house, saw Dwayne Hopkins sitting on the steps of the school, and waved him over. "Hey, Dwayne," he said, "you mind helping me with these here berry plants?"

"Sure, Mr Brown, be glad to."

They worked together in the garden, planting the strawberries until just before 5 p.m. Then Dwight Brown walked back inside his house to watch the news on one of the Memphis television stations. Soon, Dwayne's ride arrived, and he headed home for supper.

-

The same afternoon, some of the FHS girls had organized a slumber party to plan the decorations for the upcoming junior-senior banquet. Tammy Glissen and Sharon Hurt were staying over at Tammy Garrett's place for what promised to be a late night of laughter and school-girl gossip, after everyone came back from Corinth.

Tammy Glissen didn't arrive until around five that afternoon. The other girls were waiting for her. They noticed that Tammy seemed upset. "I've got to call Steve!" Tammy said. "I've got to reach him. He's got something to say to me."

Tammy Garrett and Sharon Hurt pressed on with the banquet plans, but Tammy was so worried that she couldn't concentrate. She was crying and pacing the floor. They tried to calm her, reminding her that Steve had only gone out hunting with Mike Miskelley for an hour or two. They could not imagine why Tammy would be so hysterical. "You don't understand," Tammy cried. "Steve has a rifle and he is going to kill himself! He loves me so much he is going to kill himself! We've done broke up for good, and he's so upset, he's going to shoot himself!"

-

At 5:20, Dwayne Hopkins and his classmate Robbie Albertson were traveling west on Highway 370 when they spotted Mike's blue Torino hurtling toward them in the distance. When they passed each other, Dwayne rolled down the window and waved his hand at Mike. Dwayne was a little surprised when he noticed that Steve Brown was not riding in the car.

-

At 6:15, three Falkner boys arrived early at the ag shop behind the school for a meeting of the Future Farmers of America. Mr. Brown had scheduled a meeting to make plans for a special agricultural contest, and all the boys, including Steve, were told to show up by 6:30. Jerry Barkley and Randy Moore started working on a cornpicker, giving it a fresh coat of blue paint. Timmy Hopper began shooting a basketball at a milk crate tacked to the wall. It was turning dark outside, and the lights from the shop were streaming out the windows. The boys had rolled a pickup truck halfway through the big sliding garage door and flipped on the radio.

Timmy missed a shot, and the ball rolled over toward a woodpile. He walked over and stooped to pick it up. He rose with the ball tucked under his arm, and recalls seeing Steve Brown, wearing a maroon shirt, standing in the doorway of the shop, no more than twenty feet away.

"Going to look good, ain't it, Jerry?" Steve shouted over the music, pointing at the cornpicker. Then he wandered through the shop and slipped out the back door, silently.

-

At 6:30 Dwight Brown walked into the shop. "Anybody seen Steve around here?" he asked.

"Yessir," Timmy Hopper told him. "We just saw him in here a few minutes ago."

-

Mike was shaving in his bathroom around seven o'clock when Dwight Brown knocked on the front door of the Miskelley house on Clemmer Road, four miles west of Falkner. Steve hadn't returned home yet, and Mr. Brown was growing a little concerned. He thought Mike might know something. So Mike, with a dollop of shaving cream accenting his chin, sat down in the living room and recounted his version of the afternoon's hunt. What follows is the story he would be asked to repeat many times in the weeks and months ahead:

Steve was in a crummy mood in the car. He seemed withdrawn, melancholy. He stared vacantly out the window.

Together, the two boys drove out Highway 370 toward a woodland lake behind the Little Hope Primitive Baptist Church, about four miles from the school. They planned to hunt for beaver from the edge of the water.

Mike parked the Torino behind the Little Hope church, and the two shambled across an old cemetery- Mike with his shotgun, Steve with his rifle. Mike had to work twice as hard to keep up with Steve. The steel walking stob on his cast kept sinking into the soft red earth of the graveyard.

They hiked through some woods, kicking up the wet leaves with their boots. They found two old jars from a trash dump for target practice. Steve stood them up against a tree, and the boys took turns firing at them with Steve's .22 rifle.

Steve and Mike then wandered down to the edge of the lake, but found nothing to shoot. "C'mon, Red," Steve called to Mike, "there ain't no beavers down here." They decided to return to Falkner early.

But Steve said he wasn't quite ready to go directly home, where his parents wouldn't be expecting him for at least another hour. He asked Mike to drop him off at the Bank of Falkner, just around the corner from the school. Mike didn't ask questions. Clutching his .22, Steve climbed out and slammed the door. As Mike drove away he glanced into the rear-view mirror and watched Steve receding into the twilit distance of Falkner. Steve was ambling down the railroad tracks by the bank, his rifle over his shoulder, hands thrust into pockets, head drooped forward in apparent contemplation.

Mike stopped by the Griffins Grocery to get his weekly pay check for his part-time job as a

stockboy. His boss had designated Monday as payday, so the boys wouldn't blow all their money on the weekend. Then he bought some gas at the Falkner Gulf and drove back home. He arrived

at around 5:35, returning his 20-gauge to the gunrack in his bedroom.

-

Around nine o'clock, Sue Glissen, Tammy's mother, called over at the Garrett's house to relate the news to the three girls that Steve was missing. Mrs. Glissen said her husband would be coming over soon to drive the girls to school, where they would join the gathering crowd in the search. While waiting for Mr. Glissen to arrive, Tammy Garrett and Sharon Hurt tried to reassure Tammy.

Yet Tammy seemed certain that something awful had happened to Steve. "I know it, I just know it," she said, "Steve's going to shoot himself. He's got himself a gun and he's going to do it."

-

"When it comes down to it," Thomas Glissen said while driving his Chevrolet to the school that night, "Miskelley will be the one. I told you not to fool with him." Sharon Hurt and Tammy Garrett, riding with Tammy in her father's car, thought it strange that Mr. Glissen was already pointing fingers. Most people simply assumed Steve had run off for awhile without calling home, as he had done several times before. The girls were convinced that Steve would turn up later in the evening. They suspected that Mr. Glissen has been drinking (he told them that he had been out hunting all afternoon); perhaps this explained his abrupt accusation.

A carpenter by trade, Tammy's father was known around the county as a querulous man with a terribly short fuse. Tammy's friends described him as a possessive father prone to issuing ultimatums; she seemed to be Mr. Glissen's favorite daughter, "his pick," as one friend described her. He seemed to watch over her with an eagle eye.

Because Mr. Glissen had recently suffered a serious back injury, he was no longer able to take on much carpentry work. One of his major sources of income was raising gamecocks, an activity rather on the fringe of legality in this country. While the fights themselves are strictly outlawed, Mississippi has no statutes forbidding the raising of the birds. And in poor hill country like this, gamecock farming is a viable way to generate income from otherwise useless land.

Driving by Glissen's place, some four miles east of Falkner, one can still see scattered across the front property scores of rusted-out metal drums staked length-wise to the ground, each housing a separate rooster. Gamecocks must be chained apart to prevent them from killing each other, for they will instinctively fight to the death if free to do so. Once or twice a year, buyers from Mexico and Hawaii would come in and a pay as much as $300 per gamecock. Glissen took special pride in his rooster-raising operation. "I got some pretty birds out here," he said on one occasion. " I like raising birds. I like it better than anything I've ever done."

Not all the residents of Falkner had a high opinion of Thomas Glissen. "He's taboo in the county," says one life-long resident of Falkner. "You just don't want to rock the boat with him. He's a mean, hot-tempered man. Most people won't open their mouths for fear of meeting up with him or some of his cronies on a dark road late at night."

While many Falkner residents seemed to fear him, it's also true that Glissen maintained a close circle of friends and relatives in his own neck of the woods. He lived in an area of Tippah County known as the Hatchie Bottom. The "Hatchie People"- as they are called locally- have developed a special notoriety through past generations as a kind of clannish breed nestled in the lowlands by the Little Hatchie River. They are supposedly stubborn, violent, isolated, and therefore somehow immune from the reaches of the law. "Hatchie People won't have folks poking around in their business. They'll do anything to help a friend or destroy an enemy. It's all black or white, and they hadn't got no in-between."

LATE-NIGHT VIGIL

About three dozen townspeople convened on the Falkner High School grounds that night. People stood idly by the ag shop, trading opinions on Steve's whereabouts. Some of the boys wandered out with flashlights into the surrounding countryside, crying Steve's name into the March night.

It would be a long night for Falkner. Everyone helped out in some way. The Tippah County Sheriff's Department had to be apprised of the situation; the Mississippi Highway Patrol had to be notified. Relatives had to be called. Some of the friends stayed up until dawn consoling the family, drinking coffee in the Brown's kitchen. Naturally, Dwight and Mary Ruth Brown were terribly upset. They feared that Steve might have run away for good, or worse, that he'd had an accident in some secluded place where no one could hear his cries for help.

-

Mike was standing outside the ag shop when Tammy approached him. "What did you do with Stevie?" she asked. "Where'd you put him?"

"I didn't do nothing with him, girl," Mike answered.

Mr. Glissen walked over and nudged his daughter aside. "Don't talk to him, Tammy," he said.

"Just leave him alone. He ain't going to tell you anything."

-

The men formed larger search parties to scour the back roads of Tippah County in trucks with spotlights. Some of the boys went on foot. After five hours of fruitless search, they finally decided to head home for a few hours of sleep. Mike Miskelley searched with a group of kids who covered the fields all around the school. By the end of the evening, Mike had literally walked his cast to shreds.

The searches continued on through the week. Steve's disappearance so disrupted the community that half the students missed school. "There wasn't a whole lot of learning going on that week," recalls Billy Bolden, the principal.

Overnight, the town of Falkner had produced what seemed to be an endless supply of amateur sleuths. Everyone had his own theory regarding Steve's whereabouts. Had he been kidnapped, injured, or murdered? Did he elope with a girl? Had he slipped into a lake a drowned?

Most people, however, had already ruled out the possibility that Steve had run away; his savings account had been left intact, and even his wallet was found at home.

RUMORS

Meanwhile, as the days passed, more elaborate hypotheses were evolving, stories that concerned drug trafficking, illicit deals, and vice of all kinds. It was speculated that Steve might have stumbled into some dirty business. All the latent fears and deep-seated suspicions seething in the smokehouse of hill-country life suddenly ignited. In private circles, accusations flew, grudges resurfaced. People kept a cautious eye on each other. Others climbed into their trucks and drove all around the county looking for their own answers.

Those who had heard about drug dealings in the area could easily imagine a scenario in which Steve simply walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. And no one could deny the prevalence of drug cultivation and trafficking in the remote hill country. "Marijuana could very well be the largest cash crop in Tippah County and, likely, in any poor area of the state where agricultural cultivation is not very successful," concedes Charlie Spillers, captain of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics for the north region of the state.

Many Falkner residents harbored an underlying suspicion that unexplained wealth was somehow connected to the narcotics trade, a kind of paranoia that outside money and influence had undermined the integrity of the community. (These people shared the view that any nouveau riche resident in Falkner must have generated his money through some illicit activity, for there simply was no honest source for sizable income anywhere for miles around.) Wasn't it entirely possible that Steve simply overheard some whispered piece of news one day, perhaps at the wholesale nursery where he worked? What if a group of powerful Falkner citizens involved in some kind of drug ring decided they could not afford to tallow a youngster to walk around with privileged informaton?

Of course, the people of Falkner were most curious about Mike Miskelley. Everyone wanted to investigate his story of the hunting excursion. And here, the precise sequence of events and the corresponding times were absolutely crucial. Already there were "concerned citizens" out figuring up mileage and estimating elapsed time.

Then, too, people wanted to learn all the latest details about Tammy Glissen's romances with

the two boys. It was only a matter of time before unflattering tales were told in the general community. There was an intriguing simplicity to the idea of a love triangle- a jealous 16-year old moved by passion to dispose of his best buddy, all under the seemingly innocuous circumstances of a friendly hunt deep in the woods.

Even so, Mike could not exactly be called a suspect, at least not yet. In the first place, most people were still confident that Steve would turn up, so any kind of public accusation was certainly premature. Second, several people had seen the two boys together and knew they had planned a hunting trip. It would seem to be the height of stupidity for Mike, if he indeed entertained the idea of committing murder, to plan it on an afternoon when a number of his Falkner classmates knew the two boys were supposed to be together in the woods with their guns. Third, the Miskelleys were an old, well- respected family in the country, with a reputation for decency and hard work. Wayne Miskelley was a contract electrician who was working on a TVA project, the Yellow Creek nuclear plant; Ann Miskelley worked at Kenwin's dress shop in Ripley, the county seat ten miles down the road. "The Miskelleys are fine folk," said Dwight Brown, Steve's father, in a recent interview. "You're not going to find better people in Tippah County. And when I taught Mike, I gotta say I never had any trouble out of him."

Fourth, and perhaps most important, no one could discount the fact that three friends claimed they had seen Steve in the ag shop hours after the outing with Mike. (This had become the accepted version of Steve's last sighting. It was reported in the local newspapers for many months, and the police authorities had begun their investigation on the assumption that the three boys were the last to see Steve Brown alive.)

It appeared that Mike was covered on every front, for even his description of the hunting trip seemed to fit with the evidence. There, in the graveyard of the Little Hope Primitive Baptist Church on the day after Steve's disappearance, a group of Falkner parents discovered Steve's bootprints running alongside the depressions left by the steel stob on the bottom of Mike's walking cast.

PRESSURE BUILDS

The days stretched to weeks, and Steve still did not turn up. Tippah County Sheriff Chester "Pete" Crum, a soft-spoken man in his fifties, undertook a countywide manhunt. The search was meticulous- with four-wheel-drives, horses, a forestry plane, several helicopters, and over a hundred residents organized by the volunteer fire department. Meanwhile, the Game and Fish Commission dragged several lakes.

Some of Falkner's leading citizens, including Mike's father, formed the Steve Brown Search Committee and posted a handsome reward for "information that leads to an arrest and conviction."

They staged a telephone campaign, securing pledges of money from industries and businesses to add to the reward fund. The committee printed and circulated 2,000 bumper stickers bearing Steve's photograph and advertising the reward. A psychic from Memphis was consulted for tips on Steve's wherabouts. Child-search groups, across the country were contacted, and thousands of flyers were distributed that read as follows:

"This misfortune could have happened to our child or yours. He was reared in a Christian home in a small town of 255 residents. This is evidence that such things don't just happen in large cities where crime is high... Steve collected baseball caps, not enemies, and took music, not drugs. His world was defined by the red brick buildings of Falkner High School, and even the family home is on the campus... He spent Saturdays working in a nursery and Sundays in church. He visited his grandparents and the orthodontist, not the poolroom. He might take in a movie in Ripley, but only after asking for his parent's permission."

There were several reported sightings which didn't pan out. A woman named Beth Reed, a truck driver for KLM van lines, said she had picked up a tall blond boy from Mississippi who seemed to fit Steve's description; she said she let him off at a 76 truck stop in Long View, Texas. In addition to this account, the Browns took several collect calls from people who claimed they'd seen Steve. But the reports never checked out. Vague reports like these, while usually well-intentioned, only increased the anxiety in Falkner.

As time slipped on, pressure began to build on the law-enforcement officials to unravel the mystery of the disappearance. The ordeal had agitated the whole community. There were stories of prank phone calls, threats, and strange black limousines driving through the area. One Falkner mother discovered that her son, fearing that he was next in line to disappear, had been sleeping for weeks with all the lights turned on and a loaded shotgun under his bed. People were growing furious and impatient.

They could not help wondering if a murderer was living in their midst. Neophyte sleuths came forward with pet theories that verged on the bizarre. Many began to question whether the police investigators were doing their job.

An energetic young Highway Patrol investigator out of Holly Springs named Kenneth Dickerson said he had "checked into several leads," but nothing was turning up. All the officials could do was cross their fingers and hope that something would develop.

BREAKTHROUGH

Then it emerged, the piece of evidence the investigators so desperately needed to proceed with the case. Tammy Glissen came forward with new information that suggested some level of involvement by Pete Doles, the music teacher at Falkner High School.

Doles taught the "gifted" class in which both Steve and Tammy had been enrolled. As a singing coach and roving talent agent, he had cultivated many young performing artists in the area. A nervous man with a prim black moustache, Doles and his South American wife Rosa had lately been inviting groups of students out to their place in Corinth for parties. The kids would simply tell their parents they were going to Dole's house for an evening of rehearsals for an upcoming singing engagement, and sometimes they would even spend the night. They would indeed rehearse, but often they would party and play music and watch films on Doles' VCR.

Doles was regarded by Falkner parents as a friendly but rather spooky man. After all, this was a small town that, by nature, did not take kindly to outsiders. Not only was Doles from Corinth, but he had also travelled around a a good bit and had a wife who was a foreigner. To locals, he seemed unsettled.

Pete Doles was a teacher who seemed to dote on his most talented pupils. He collected photographs of them and even taped home videos of the kids for entertainment. His prize student was a boy named Kenny Graves. Kenny was considered the most talented one of the bunch. Doles liked him so much he once offered to adopt him. But after Kenny, Steve was Doles' favorite. Doles even promised to take Kenny and Steve on a musical tour of Europe someday. "Steve wasn't a great singer," Doles later said. "But he was good, and I liked his values. I mean, he was somebody that everybody looked up to."

Sheriff Crum and Inspector Dickerson had already considered Doles to be a suspect. But they had absolutely no evidence to go on, other than a few wild rumors. What was more, Doles had an alibi that was seemingly airtight: he had been performing in Oxford for the Shriners Club with some twenty people the night of Steve's disappearance. This led investigators to conclude that Doles could not have been involved in the kidnapping or murder of Steve Brown unless he had hired an accomplice, a hit man. But until Tammy offered her account, the investigators could only speculate.

Tammy signed an affidavit on April 8, 1981, two weeks after the disappearance. Though she volunteered her statement to Sheriff Crum, her role in implicating Doles was never openly acknowledged or reported in the local papers. The affidavit told of the Thursday night following Steve's disappearance, when Doles took Tammy out to his house in Corinth before a scheduled singing engagement. She said the walls of his house were covered with photographs of Steve. She recalled that Doles answered a phone call and that during the course of the conversation Doles referred to Steve repeatedly. "I got his girl friend here with me now," he said.

After he hung up, Doles showed a home videotape of Steve that made Tammy "cry and cry." Then he began to tell her a story about a recent evening when he showed Steve an adult movie on the VCR. At this, Tammy started crying again, but Doles told her not to worry because "Steve fell asleep during the bad parts." He showed her a room with a "big bed" where Steve had supposedly slept before. Then Tammy said she wanted to walk upstairs and visit a room where the kids would often hang out during Doles' parties, but he wouldn't let her. He told her he couldn't let her see it, because "it's a mess up there."

After Tammy's statement was released, the authorities began to question the parents of the students who studied under Doles. Some of them suggested that Doles could easily have had a motive for making Steve disappear. Perhaps something had happened one night at Doles' house, something that Doles feared Steve would tell his parents about; perhaps he feared this would jeopardize his teaching position at the high school. Thus, there was speculation that he had hired a hit man to clean up the situation on an afternoon when he had a surefire alibi.

Certainly Tammy's affidavit raised more questions than it answered, but it was enough to prompt further investigation by authorities. Several days later Sheriff Crum procured a search warrant, and the local police broke into Doles' home while he and his wife were away. they overturned furniture, flipped through personal letters, peered under mattresses and carpets. "I think they more or less ransacked the place," Investigator Dickerson later acknowledged. Thought they didn't exactly find what they were looking for, their interest was undiminished.

-

When Doles returned home and found the place in shambles, he was naturally furious. He called the police, he called the highway patrol, he called an attorney; in a rage, he even called the Browns, thinking they must have had something to do with the search. (He came by the Browns' house the next day and apologized.) Doles threatened to sue the police for what he contended was an unwarranted search.

Meanwhile, Sheriff Crum began a more thorough investigation into Doles. The police interrogated him on several occasions. After doing some checking on his own, Crum made some interesting discoveries. Among other things, he found that Doles had a rather erratic employment history, moving across Mississippi from one teaching position to the next, year after year. Without explanation, Doles had been dismissed from the Alcorn County school system (he taught music in Biggersville) before coming to Falkner. "I've already found out enough about that man that we don't need the son of a bitch in our school system anymore," Sheriff Crum told one concerned mother whose son had studied under Doles.

Soon, a group of outraged parents started petitions calling for the immediate removal of Doles from the North Tippah County Schools; formal complaints were lodged with the county school board. Doles successfully defended himself, however, dismissing the whole movement to fire him as "a witch hunt." He managed to stay on the rest of the year, but some of his students, including Kenny Graves, dropped out of his classes.

-

Soon thereafter, to almost everyone's surprise, the investigation ground to an abrupt halt. Locals say this was largely the result of Doles' decision to hire one of the most prominent trial lawyers in the state of Mississippi.

John B. Farese, Sr. had established an immensely successful criminal law practice in Ashland, the county seat of neighboring Benton County. A native of Boston who grew up in that city's Italian section, Farese married a Mississippi belle and studied law at Ole Miss during the Fifties. As a young attorney, he established a reputation for representing blacks at a time when such a thing simply wasn't done.

A criminal trial for John Farese was a form of public entertainment, a match of wits in the shirt-sleeve tradition of the old populist orators. Certainly Farese was the closest thing Northern Mississippi had to a William Jennings Bryan. He was a brilliant performer who presented his arguments slowly, patiently, methodically, homing in on his central point, taking great care to avoid legal jargon that country juries might not understand. He was the sort of attorney who often hauled in props to the courtroom to make even the simplest of points-visual aids, hand-drawn diagrams, posters. In the end, he almost always won over the jury. (Esquire magazine listed Farese in a register of the nation's most successful trial lawyers in 1983.)

Farese's skills were so legendary, in fact, that they inspired this local witticism: If you commit a murder on Saturday, then just go to church on Sunday and call up Big John first thing Monday-and all your sins will be forgiven. "They say Big John will pat a man on the back just to find a place to stick in the knife," one Ashland resident says. "He'll read from the Good Book, he'll cry his eyes out, why he'll do just about anything to get that jury on his side."

Political influence, reputation, rapport with the local folk- these were the crucial components to a successful defense. And these were precisely the qualities that Farese brought to his new client, Pete Doles. A criminal investigation into Doles might well prove to be more trouble than it was worth.

With Doles retaining Farese, the police began backing off. They apologized profusely for having been so overzealous, and decided that Doles' relationship with Steve was not so mysterious after all. "We just really couldn't relate anything very strong to Doles," explains Investigator Kenneth Dickerson. "He employed Mr. Farese as counsel, and after the search of his house was made, we couldn't even talk to him anymore without his attorney being present." Dickerson and Crum eventually dismissed Doles and his wife as a middle-aged couple who simply loved young people; Pete Doles was no kidnapper or murderer, just a peculiar sort of man who probably had no business teaching in Tippah County.

CONFESSION

It was now May of 1981. Weeks had passed without anything significant turning up for Crum or Dickerson: no leads, no body, indeed, no provable crime. And yet the letters were pouring into their offices day after day, the pressure to solve the case forever building. The public cry for a solution even prompted the local authorities to request an FBI agent to look into the case.

Not only was it the biggest case Crum and Dickerson had ever dealt with; it was also becoming a matter of politics. If they could crack the Brown case, their reputation as law-enforcement officials would be immeasurably enhanced. For Crum, it would mean a coveted letter of commendation, or a promotion within the the Investigative Division of the Mississippi Highway Patrol. High-profile cases like these do not come along very often, particularly in rural areas. When they do, it is certainly a feather in an investigator's cap if he turns up enough evidence for a conviction.

-

Though Steve's departure had upset the kids of FHS, school soon resumed its normal operations for the most part. The parties and the baseball practices and the meetings of the Future Farmers of America (and its female counterpart, Future Homemakers of America) carried on as usual. During the spring, Tammy Glissen and Mike Miskelley began seeing each other again. They were always on the phone; they sat together in the back of their classes, passing notes and cutting up.

The rekindling of their romance no doubt disappointed Thomas Glissen. Not only was Tammy's father very protective of his favorite daughter; there was also something of a feud between the Glissens and the Miskelleys. This dated back to one fall several years earlier, when the community had been embroiled in a rather fierce debate over that matter of deer hunting with dogs. Wayne Miskelley was one of a number of Falkner residents who regarded deer hunting with tracking hounds as a low and distasteful sport. These critics claimed it was a dangerous practice that essentially allowed hunters to wait with their rifles in their four-wheel-drive trucks until their dogs illegally ran the deer out of posted lands. (The rationale: dogs can't read "posted" signs, so they can run wherever they like.)

On this occasion, a group of citizens led by Miskelley was determined to have the sport outlawed in Tippah County. Thomas Glissen, on the other hand, was a vocal proponent of the practice. One night, when the Mississippi Game and Fish Commission staged a public hearing over in Holly Springs to permit debate, both Glissen and Miskelley showed up. There was a bit of an altercation between the men, and the meeting degenerated into a shouting match. Thomas Glissen and Wayne Miskelley had avoided each other ever since.

-

Mike Miskelley was home with his mother Nita Ann and his brother Todd early on the evening of May 18th when Sheriff Crum and Investigator Dickerson knocked on the door. The kids were getting dressed to go rollerskating in Ripley. "Mrs. Miskelley," Sheriff Crum said, "we've got a little statement here that we took earlier from Miss Tammy Glissen over at her parents' house. Now, we're going to have to read it to you and Michael."

Tammy's statement was the most sensational evidence so far presented:

Me and Mike Miskelley were at Falkner School several days ago. Mike said, "I've got something to tell you...I'm going to hell." I said, "If you ask forgiveness, you might not." I told Mike to tell me what it is. Mike said "It is about Steve." His eyes got red. The next day he talked to me on the phone. Mike said, "It would have been me or him. I done it for a four-letter word called L-O-V-E, because of you.

Because I loved you. I knew he was coming between us." I got off the phone. The next morning, I wanted to know the whole story. I told him I'd hate him if he didn't tell me. MIke said, "OK."

The next morning at school Mike said, "You remember the Sunday before Steve was gone. He got jealous and mad at me. That Sunday, I dug a hole. I invited Steve to go hunting with me on Monday. I picked Steve up and we headed down Highway 370. Steve was upset, you know, he wasn't talking about much. We got to the woods and Steve had his gun. I didn't have a gun. There was a bucket and a Coke bottle we set up to shoot at..."

Mike said, "I saw where I had dug the hole but Steve didn't see it. This was the time I had to do what I had come to do... but I couldn't do it. Steve said, ' I don't believe we're going to find any beavers around here.' I saw the hold. I knew I had to it. I turned my head and pulled the trigger. I turned back around and I saw Steve take a couple of steps and he went to his knees. I looked at him and he sort of mumbled and gradually fell down."

Mike told me not to cry. I had started crying. I asked him, "Did it look bad?" and Mike said, "Not at all." I had to know everything, I said. "A .22, if you didn't aim, it wouldn't hurt anyone." Mike said, "No, it only took one. It didn't look bad. Steve only had some blood coming from his nose. He must have been turning around to tell me something. It hit him behind the left ear." Mike showed me on my head where the location was where the bullet hit Steve. I asked Mike if he had blood on him and he said he had some on his blond hair. Mike said he leaned against a tree and cried. "I loved him," Mike said, " but I also loved you..." He put Steve in the hole he had dug and threw dirt on top of him and the gun. Later Mike told me that Mr. Brown and some others had walked over the grave when they were at this location. Mike said he covered up the grave with the limbs an dleaves to make it hard to see."

"Did you tell this to Tammy?" Kenny Dickerson asked Mike.

"No sir," Mike said.

"Mrs. Miskelley," Sheriff Crum said, pausing, "we're going to have to take Mike down to the station for a while. We have to ask him a few questions."

She hesitated at the threshold of the front door, wiping her hands with a dishtowel. "Couldn't you wait until my husband gets home from work? Wayne just had to stop off at the Union Hall in Corinth on his way home. He'll be back any minute."

"No, maam," Sheriff Crum said. "It's really quite urgent that we get down to the station right now, if you don't mind. They're all pretty stirred up about this back in town. We reckon he'd be safer in our custody."

"Will he have to spend the night in jail?" she asked.

"Yes, because we don't know but someone might try and harm Mike. We need to take him into protective custody."

Ann Miskelley broke into tears, pleading with them to wait until her husband arrived.

"I'll tell you what," Sheriff Crum said. "We'll take Mike on over to the sheriff's office, and then when Wayne gets back, ya'll can drive over and we can talk then."

Mike assured his mother he'd be fine. He said he had nothing to fear from their questions. He climbed into the patrol car and they drove off down the gravel road toward Ripley.

ABSOLVED

Ann Miskelley leaned against the doorjamb of her ranch-style house of gray cypress siding and collected her thoughts. She waited for her husband for about thirty minutes, but apparently he was running late. Finally, she decided to drive down to the sheriff's office alone.

Yet when she arrived, about fifteen minutes later, she discovered that Mike and the policemen had not yet returned to the station. Worried- and a little puzzled by the sheriff's earlier suggestion of urgency- she questioned the clerk, who claimed that Sheriff Crum had just radioed to say they were on their way back. They didn't arrive for another twenty minutes.

When Sheriff Crum arrived, he proposed to Mike's mother that if he would submit to a polygraph test in Jackson the next day, and the test came out favorably, the authorities could clear him of all suspicion. While lie-detector tests are inadmissible as evidence in a courtroom, investigators customarily use them to determine whether to pursue or abandon leads in cases that have reached a

stalemate. For Crum and Dickerson, this was just such a case. Mike agreed to take the test. Then

Crum told Ann Miskelley that Mike didn't have to spend the night in the jail after all, but he recommended that he stay away from home to avoid the threats of vigilantes. (In fact, he spent the night at his grandparents' house.)

On the way back to Falkner, Ann Miskelley asked Mike where Sheriff Crum had taken him. Mike told this story:

Crum and the patrolman drove me out to Little Hope Church. We walked across that old cemetery and down toward the lake, just like me and Steve had walked together the day we went hunting. Then, we came to a little mound of dirt way back up in them woods. Crum radioed to Deputy Quincy Cook to come bring a shovel over to the site. They was going to dig up the mound. They said it was Steve's gravesite. When Officer Cook returned, he got down and started digging. Sheriff Crum told him to stop, and said to me, "You put the damn thing there; now you dig it up, you red-headed bastard." So Officer Cook handed over the shovel to me. I never been so frightened in my life. But I begin to dig and dig, and my hands was shaking so on the shovel handle. But it turned out to be nothing but a little old animal burrow, like where a possum or beaver had dug in the dirt. There was nothing in it. Sheriff Crum, he looked kinda mad and then he said to me, "Where in the goddamn hell did you put him?" I told him I done nothing with Steve. We all walked back to the squad car and drove to the station.

(When asked to respond to Mike's account, Pete Crum declined to comment. "I really can't afford to say a thing about it," he said in a recent phone interview. "The story Mike tells will just have to be the story you print." Likewise, Quincy Cook refused to discuss the grave-digging incident.)

-

That night Wayne Miskelley sat down with Mike on the couch in their den and said, "Son, if there's anything you haven't told us, you'd better tell us now. We don't want no surprises tomorrow." Mike said there was nothing. He wanted to take the test.

So on May 19th, the Miskelleys rode in the squad car with Kenneth Dickerson and Deputy

Donald Butler to the Mississippi Highway Patrol Headquarters in Jackson. Mike was scheduled to take a lie-detector test that would be administered by one Donald G. Bray, whom Inspector Dickerson lauded as the "finest polygraph examiner in the state." He was Dickerson's best man, the one he most often used in important cases like this one.

Bray administered one three-part test which asked straight yes-or-no questions such as "Did you kill Steve Brown?" and "Do you know who killed Steve Brown?" During the first run-through the needle was erratic because Mike was so nervous. After Bray studied the readings in the lab, however, the Miskelleys claim that he walked out into the anteroom where Mike was sitting, slipped his hand around his shoulder, and told them: "Congratulations! It looks like Mike is telling the truth. He's clean. I'm completely satisfied with the results." They said Bray told them that polygraph tests were ordinarily 90 percent reliable, and that he felt quite sure about this one.

(When recently questioned about this, Bray claimed the test was inconclusive, and he denied

having told the Miskelleys that he was convinced of Mike's innocence. "The needle was so erratic," Bray contended, "that I really couldn't read anything into it." Yet in a tape-recorded interview with defense lawyers when the case finally came to trial, Investigator Dickerson, who was with Mike after the test was administered, claimed that "it was the opinion of the operator that run it that Mike clearly passed it. He was more or less satisfied.")

Whether or not Mike passed the polygraph test, the Miskelleys maintain they were at least led to believe he had passed it. So Mike returned to Falkner with a feeling that the ordeal was finally over. He hoped the test would allay the community's suspicions; he felt he'd been officially absolved. "After he took the lie-detector test, he got kind of cocky," recalls Tate Rutherford, a friend of the Miskelleys. "It was kind of a joke to him. It was just like, 'See there, I haven't done anything.' He really didn't understand the seriousness of it."

-

Wayne Miskelley claims that Sheriff Crum invited him to his office the next day and apologized for all the trouble the police had caused the family. He said he genuinely appreciated their cooperation throughout the investigation. Wayne Miskelley says he remembers the conversation vividly. "Crum told me, 'People've been hollering at me, but, you know, I got a job to do. But you don't let nobody throw this at Mike anymore. If they do, you just tell them where to get off at. Or send them to me, and by God, I'll tell them where to get off at.' "

After the lie-detector episode, Mike Miskelley went several months without speaking to Tammy Glissen. Then one day late that summer, during a football practice, he saw her on the field with the cheerleading squad. During a water break, he approached her. "Why in the hell did you do that to me?" he says he asked her. " How come you told them all that stuff?" He says Tammy apologized and exclaimed, "They made me. If I hadn't, I would have been in trouble."

In Mike's yearbook that precious spring, Tammy jotted a note in the back. "I hope you don't hold a grudge against me for nothing," she wrote. "Love ya, Tammy."

THE CLASS OF 1982

Summer passed. It was now six months since Steve Brown's disappearance. The law-enforcement officials had turned up nothing. The district attorney, Kenneth Coleman, was deluged with mail urging him to do something. The Falkner Board of Aldermen fired off letters to all the law-enforcement officials concerned, and the Steve Brown Search Committee augmented its reward fund.

Meanwhile, there were accusations that Investigator Dickerson had all but abandoned the case. "I caught hell from the victim's family at first," Dickerson recalled in a recent phone interview, "and then from a number of individuals who didn't like the way I was handling it. But you know, it's easy to be a Monday-morning quarterback. They were all criticizing me because I couldn't bring the boy home alive to them for Christmas. Then the family called the Governor's office. There was a lot of pressure coming from the top down. Headquarters was calling every week, and, not only that, I was trying to work five more murder cases at the same time."

When the 1981-1982 school year began that fall, Principal James W. Bolden announced that Tammy Glissen and Mike Miskelley were to be separated at all times in a special kind of quarantine arrangement. Everybody in the school was asked to help monitor the couple. Bolden laid down the guidelines in a memo dated September 23rd:

Due to problems that have arisen between Mike Miskelley and Tammy Glissen, the administration, faculty, and board members feel that some action should be taken.

A. These students will be separated in classrooms in different sections where possible.

1. B. They are not to associate with one another at all on school property (day or night). This means all contact

2. C. Any obscene language, gesture, or physical contact will be grounds for dismissal.

1. D. Any messages carried by other students, notes, staring, etc. will be considered contact and will be punished.

2.

Though these seemed to be rather draconian measures for a high-school setting, Bolden's "quarantine" could only go so far. Mike says he snuck out with Tammy quite often. Evidently, a reconciliation had taken place that fall. The quarantined classmates used to rendezvous at a secluded place known as Braddock Lake. Later in the year, they would meet at the garage apartment of a mutual friend named Lawrence Jay Roberts at 605 1/2 Tindale Street in Ripley. Roberts was a manager at the Sonic Drive-in, where Mike had worked during the summer. Roberts eventually gave Mike a set of keys to the apartment, so he and Tammy would have a place to meet in private.

During the 1981-1982 school year, Tammy wrote scores of love notes to Mike: lyrics to songs, original verses, lines copied out of old poetry books. He kept a few of them, like the one entitled "The Way I Want It":

I love you

and you love me

Both of us together...forever

Is the way I want it to be.

Sharing our love with each other

Holding each other close when in need

Never letting you go... No, never

Is the way I want it to be

Our love will be a special one

A kind that everybody will want to see

Holding, sharing, loving, caring

Is the way I want it to be

I'll never leave you and hope

You'll never leave me

Both of us together...forever

Yeah...That's the way I want it to be.

Love ya, Tammy

-

In May of 1982 there was a rather peculiar incident that caught the eye of local newspaper reporters. Law-enforcement officers claimed they had reason to suspect that Steve's body had been dumped in Braddock Lake, a flood-control reservoir in Tippah County, but they refused to reveal to reporter what prompted the suspicion. The only evidence suggested obliquely in the newspaper reports was the fact that Mike Miskelley had been seen "fishing" alone at the lake. "All we know is, he's the last person that saw Steve," explained Sheriff Crum, "and that's all we've got to go on." (The newspapers now reported Crum's contention that the three boys who claimed they had seen Steve later at the ag shop were "mistaken.")

So on May 15th, under the supervision of the Soil Conservation Service of the Department of Agriculture and the Mississippi Department of Wildlife Conservation, the police officers had the 57-acre Braddock Lake drained.

"I can't do anything without them thinking it has something to do with Steve," Miskelley told Ingrid Roebuck of Tupelo's Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal at the time. "I went fishing at that lake and now they're draining it. I don't really care if they drain it or not... In one way, I' d be glad [if they found Steve's body] because then it would all be over for the Browns. But I'd be scared, too, because I'd be afraid they would try to stick me with it."

(Later, Mike would concede that he'd been a bit disingenuous in explaining his presence out on Braddock Lake that day. He said the real reason he was at the lake was to meet secretly with Tammy. According to Mike, Thomas Glissen was also down at the lake that day. He spotted Mike just before Tammy was supposed to arrive. Suspicious of some kind of rendezvous, Glissen drove Mike off the premises. Mike claims Glissen was the one who alerted the law-enforcement officers and recommended draining the lake.)

It took several weeks to drain Braddock Lake. Once the water was shallow enough, Crum and Dickerson began a search for Steve's body. "Concerned citizens" volunteered by the dozen.

Milton Lester of Byhalia brought out his metal detector, and David Smith of White's Crossing tried his hand with a homemade contraption similar to a mineral rod. (Smith claimed the rod would detect anything from metal to dollar bills.) But the search was a failure. After dragging and wading through all 57 acres of the lake, they turned up nothing but beer cans, garbage, and dead fish.

-

Shortly thereafter, Falkner High School's class of 1982 finally graduated, marching through the school's wrought-iron gates with their senior-week slogan, "We're lots of fun, just a crazy crew/ 'Cause we're the class of "82!"

In a student poll, the senior class chose, as their favorite movie, Endless Love, the steamy tale

of teen romance starring Brooke Shields. Tammy Glissen, who had enjoyed a popular senior year as captain of the cheerleading squad, had a lengthy listing in the Class of 1982 yearbook. She was voted Best All Around. Mike Miskelley had spent a much more low-key senior year- not surprising in view of all the controversy- but he had played a major role in the senior class play, Toga! Toga! Toga!

DISCOVERY

The months passed. Mike and Tammy continued to see each other until that August, when Mike enrolled at Northeast Mississippi Junior College in Booneville. In November, Tammy married a man from Ripley named John Daniel "Boom Boom" Nance.

Then it happened. On December 27th, Danny Ross, a 15 year-old from Corinth, was deer hunting with his father in the National Forest lands of eastern Benton County. They were hunting in a secluded place, about a quarter-mile walk down a steep ravine from the Old Blackwell Baptist Church, seven miles west of Falkner off Mississippi Highway 370. That day, while hiking by a small stream, Danny came across something strange: a rusty rifle, stuck barrel-down into the mud of the shallow creekbed. He pulled it out of the sand and studied it for a while. Walking on by the stream he stumbled upon something that scared him, lying partially exposed in the old damp leaves. He hurried through the woods to where his father, Herman Ross, wwas hunting, and said, "Daddy, what does a human skull look like?"

The skull was marked with several hairline fractures and two round holes, like bullet wounds. Nearby, Danny and his father found some scattered bones.

Soon, the locals were streaming down to investigate. They trampled over the brush and marked a clear path with red ribbons. When the police authorities arrived, they organized a thorough search of the site. Some kids found a nylon sock that had several small foot bones inside it. Others found the inside pocket of a pair of denim jeans, and a human mandible. A man with a metal detector turned up some bullet fragments, and several human teeth held together with dental braces.

Some of the circumstances surrounding the discovery were rather peculiar. Though it was an out-of-the-way place, this woodland area was a favorite spot for numerous local deer hunters. What was more intriguing, four-wheel-drive tracks were discovered within fifteen feet of the bones, and some of the trees around the site were skinned up, suggesting that someone recently had driven a truck through the area. And while the .22 rifle was found in a conspicuous position- driven into the creekbed with the stock straight up in the air- the stock of the rifle was muddy and riddled with termite holes, which seemed to indicate that it had been lying on its side at one time.

Whether or not the remains were planted, however, the police authorities were confident that they had found Steve Brown. When the officers presented the old rifle to Dwight Brown, he immediately recognized it as his son's Mossburg .22 bolt-action. "That's when I knew it was all over," Mr. Brown later said.

The remains were sent to Dr. Michael West, a forensic odontologist in Jackson. After analyzing the teeth against Steve's dental records, Dr. West was able to positively identify the remains as belonging to Steve Brown.

Thus, the 21-month search finally ended. Now the law-enforcement officers could proceed with the case. "I don't want to use the word 'relief,' " said Walter Tucker, chief investigator for the Mississippi Highway Patrol, at the time. "But at least we know we don't have to look anywhere else for him. The not-knowing is what's been so bad."

An autopsy was conducted at the Mississippi Crime Laboratory in Jackson. The report, signed by a state pathologist named Dr. Rodrigo Galvez, indicated that a small-caliber bullet entered the back of Steve Brown's head and exited through the front of the skull. Walter Tucker said the authorities were now definitely treating the matter as a homicide case. He told Mike Tapscott of The Commercial Appeal that, although Steve's rifle was discovered next to his remains, the authorities had ruled out suicide.

The North Tippah County Schools were closed all day for Steve's funeral on January 6, 1983. At the Ripley Funeral Home over 1,500 mourners- six times the population of Falkner- gathered for a thirty-minute memorial service. A color photograph of Steve was placed atop the casket. The wreaths lined the walls and spilled out into the hallway. "In our minds, an unbelievable nightmare has come to an

end," eulogized Reverend Billy Foley. "An awful crime has been committed, and an awful injustice has been done. I know his family thinks the whole world has caved in, but they know today how many friends they have." In the audience, sitting near the back with his family, was Mike Miskelley.

Steve Brown was buried later that day at the Forked Oak Baptist Church Cemetery in Prentiss County, Mississippi.

INDICTMENT

On December 28th, the day after the remains were found in the Benton County woods, Sheriff Pete Crum and Investigator Kenneth Dickerson picked Mike Miskelley up at his grandmother's house, and brought him to the Tippah County Sheriff's office for questioning. Two days later, they obtained a warrant and searched the Miskelley house.

On January 13, 1983, the authorities scheduled a meeting of a regular grand jury to present the results of their investigation. "We got to narrow this thing down," explained Kenneth Coleman, the burly, good-natured district attorney for the Third Circuit Court District. "We got to figure out who did it and then prosecute them." Coleman decided to turn the investigation over to a grand jury rather than follow the customary procedure of having a law-enforcement agency first file charges. Coleman said it was part of a special "strategy" which the D.A.'s office was pursuing.

The grand jury met in the Benton County seat of Ashland, some fifteen miles from Falkner. The case was now under the jurisdiction of Benton County, not Tippah, because Steve Brown's body had been discovered just several hundred yards on the Benton side of the boundary between the two counties.

After a thirty-minute proceeding in the Benton County Courthouse on January 13th, a grand jury indicted Mike Miskelley for the murder of Steve Brown. The evidence law enforcement officials presented centered on the statement Tammy Glissen had offered back in May of 1981. "The only motive that we know," Benton County Sheriff Pat Gresham told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, "is that the two boys dated the same girl at one time." The indictment asserted that "Mike Miskelley on the 23rd day of March, 1981, did willfully, unlawfully, feloniously and of his malice aforethought kill and murder Steve Brown." Though the alleged crime presumably took place when he was a minor, Miskelley, now 18, would be tried as an adult, on a charge of first-degree murder. Miskelley spent eight days in the Benton County jail until bail could be arranged.

On January 26th he entered a plea of not guilty, and was released on a $75,000 property bond put up by his grandfather, John Elmer Miskelley. Before this, few people in Falkner were aware that the Miskelley family had that kind of money, so the announcement of the bail created a bit of a stir. It was at this point, according to one local attorney, that a number of lawyers in the surrounding counties suddenly took interest in the Miskelleys.

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The Miskelleys had already hired an attorney out of Ripley named James W. Pannell. A chain- smoking, fast-talking bear of a man who wrote a sports column for Ripley's weekly Southern Sentinel, Pannell had followed the Brown case like everyone else in the area. When a scared Ann Miskelley showed up in his office on a cold December afternoon, he was naturally excited. Here was a propitious opportunity for a young country lawyer to establish a real name for himself. It was a career-maker, a once-in-a-lifetime murder case in his own backyard. If Pannell prevailed, people would remember his name for years to come. "Oh yes, Jim Pannell, the man who won the Miskelley case."

But it was not to be. Pannell only handled the initial paperwork and represented Mike at the grand jury hearing. Then he came down with pneumonia. One afternoon in a hospital bed, Pannell learned that the Miskelleys had "released" him. They had hired a new attorney: an eloquent young patrician from the Delta named William O. Luckett, Jr.

This was no random choice. Bill Luckett was the son-in-law of none other than "Big John" Farese, the influential Ashland attorney. (Luckett's wife, Kay Farese Luckett, also happened to be a partner in the Luckett firm in Clarksdale at the time.) The Miskelleys had first sought the services of John Farese, since he was, after all, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the state. But Farese had told the Miskelleys that he simply could not take on the case, for there was a conflict of interest

problem involving another lawyer in the Farese firm, an attorney named John Riemenschneider. As it happened, Riemenschneider was also the Benton County prosecuting attorney. In this capacity, he would be called upon to assist the D.A.'s office in preparing the prosecution against Miskelley. Another reason Farese wouldn't represent the Miskelleys was that in the course of defending Mike he might be required to indulge in the unethical practice of implicating a former client, Pete Doles, the former Falkner High music teacher.

Farese could not afford to get too close to the case. But if the Miskelleys couldn't have Farese, perhaps they could have the next best thing: his own daughter and son-in-law. So Farese referred the Miskelleys to the Luckett Law office, an attractive colonial brick building with holly shrubs and monkey grass fronting Yazoo Street in Clarksdale.

Bill Luckett was a formidable attorney in his own right. He cut a dashing figure in a courtroom, with his James Davis suits and his imposing stature. He had a Delta dialect that came off as smooth as custard pie. He was a real workhorse, always on the go, full of steam. He was well-educated, with a B.A. from the University of Virginia and a law degree from Ole Miss. And the Luckett firm had an old and well-established practice with tastefully-furnished offices in both Clarksdale and Memphis. With its legal expertise and its big-city connections, the Luckett firm could surely put together a strong defense.

Still, there were other aspects to the choice of Luckett. Living as he did in faraway Clarksdale- over a hundred miles away- Luckett could not know a tremendous amount abut the labyrinthine politcs of law enforcement in Benton and Tippah counties. Nor did he have very much experience with big murder trials like these; the Luckett firm had established its reputation for handling insurance and real-estate claimes, not criminal cases. Then, too, Luckett's style was in some ways contrary ot the sensibilities of the Mississippi hill people. He flew his own airplane, drove a Mercedes, wore a gold wristwatch. He projected an image of legal sophistication and confidence that might easily backfire on a suspicious country jury.

Beyond these particulars, there has traditionally been a kind of regional hostility between Mississippians of the Delta and those who hail from the hill country farther east. It came as no surprise when, after the trial, Luckett received an angry letter from an anonymous elderly resident of Booneville. "Hello, William," the note opened, " You come out of the rich land trying to pull the wool over the hill people's eyes."

PREPARATION

A trial date was set for March 22nd in Benton County Courthouse, so Luckett had very little time to prepare a defense. At first, he considered filing a motion for a continuance- postponing the trial to a later date- but Miskelley, his client, wanted to get through the ordeal as quickly as possible. The sooner the better. Besides, Luckett was confident that this was going to be a simple circumstantial evidence case; he thought thre was no need to prolong the investigation.

For strategic reasons, Luckett decided not to seek a change of venue. A defense attorney can request that a trial be heard in another part of the state- this is often done with highly-publicized homicide cases that concern a large number of passionately involved locals. Obtaining a change of venue is by no means an automatic procedure. But if there ever was a case in Benton County that seemed to call for a change of venue, it was this one. "Ashland is within rock-throwing distance of Falkner," says Bill Rennick, then the mayor of Ashland. "There wasn't anybody in Benton County who didn't already have some kind of opinion on the Brown case. I think we were all surprised that it ended up here, with all the people so wrapped up in it."

In fact, the first thing Jim Pannell had done after he was hired by the Miskelleys was to begin the paperwork for a change of venue. "I don't think there is any likelihood that Mike could get a fair trial anywhere in northeast Mississippi because of the publicity," Pannell told The Commercial Appeal.

Luckett's explanation for not requesting a change of venue was two-fold. First, he believed that Mike had at least as many supporters as adversaries in the area; at least in Benton County there would always be a sizeable body of friends in the courtroom audience, if not the jury box, who would naturally be sympathetic to Mike's version of events. Second, Luckett hoped that the local influence of his father-in-law, John B. Farese, might contribute, however indirectly, to a successful defense. If he moved the trial to another country, Luckett would in a sense forfeit a trump card.

So Luckett stuck with Benton County, making sure that Farese's law office received copies of all the documents from the Miskelley file. Farese promised to help Luckett behind the scenes in small but crucial ways, like rendering informed opinions on the jury selection.

With or without Farese's help, Luckett and his assistants Robert H. Norman and Daniel D. Warlick encountered some serious obstacles while researching the case. They found it nearly impossible to take statements from or talk to the State's witnessess; Investigator Kenneth Dickerson had advised at least some of these witnessess not to talk with defense lawyers before the trial. Luckett learned that the State's chief witness, Tammy Glissen Nance, had left town on March 9th and would not return until March 21st, the day before the trial was to open. (This despite a subpoena that required her presence for a deposition.) And Bob Norman got nowhere with his attempts to interrogate Thomas Glissen before the trial. "Did Kenny [Dickerson] tell you not to talk?" Norman asked during an interview with Glissen. "Kenny told us not to talk to nobody," Glissen answered.

What was more, Luckett found himself frittering away much of his time on wild goose chases. For example, Luckett received an unsolicited letter from an inmate at Parchman Prison named Jack Etheridge who claimed he knew something important about the Brown case. So Luckett went down to the prison and interviewed the man. Etheridge explained that an acquaintance named Gerald Wayne Dillard had asked to borrow his GMC truck one afternoon back in the spring of 1981 to dispose of the body of a Falkner boy. "Dillard said it was somebody up at Falkner that was a homosexual," said Etheridge, "and he'd been going with some boys. Well, one of them was running his mouth. So he was going to have him killed. And Dillard was hired to get rid of the body."

The fact that this volunteered information came out of the blue from a man who apparently knew nothing else about the Brown case was intriguing to Luckett. (Luckett did some checking on Gerald Wayne Dillard and learned that he had been charged with accessory to murder in Mississippi back in 1980 and sentenced to eight years probation.) But Luckett also knew that prison inmates are notorious for concocting tales like these to get out of prison for a day or two to testify in court under a subpoena. The more Luckett talked with Etheridge, the less interested he became; and, with the trial date fast approaching, he had no time to waste on red herrings.

THE GREAT ASHLAND TRIAL

Presiding over the frowzy square of Ashland, the Benton County Courthouse with its gray cupola and its country Victorian styling seems an incongruous structure, like a temple sprung from the mud. Originally constructed in 1873, the courthouse was remodeled in 1970. It is a two-story building of white brick with white columns and gray trim, surrounded by an attractive little yard with

magnolias and boxwoods and white lattice gazebo. The old-timers sit in rocking chairs by the steps of the building, whittling and spitting tobacco juice.

Across the street from the courthouse lawn, tucked away in a one-story building on the south end of Ashland square, is the Farese law firm. There is also Roger's Dollar Store, PJ's Treasure Chest, the Mississippi Farm Bureau, a post office, a Piggly-Wiggly grocery, and the offices of the weekly Southern Advocate ("We Favor Continuous Progress"). But the courthouse stands at the center of it all.

The State of Mississippi v. Michael Wayne Miskelley (Benton Case No. 2904) opened on March 22, 1983- one day before the second anniversary of Steve's disappearance. Before it was all over, the trial would become, quite simply, the biggest and most publicized event in the history of Ashland. Over forty witnesses would testify in the emotional five-day trial. "The last big case we had in Benton County was twelve years ago," said Ashland Mayor Bill Rennick, "and the Miskelley trial makes that one look puny in comparison." Reporters form Jackson and Memphis- as well as all the regional weeklies- followed the trial closely, and there was a good deal of coverage by local tv stations. The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, out of Tupelo, would include the Miskelley Trial among its top five stories of the year.

Each morning at 8:30 the spectators would crowd into the second-floor courtroom- a bright room filled with musty portraits of judges and statesmen out of northern Mississippi's past. The trial attracted some 300 spectators each day into a courtroom that normally seats only 189. Many of the spectators would line up a full hour early to insure a good seat. Stragglers would bring along folding chairs to set up in the empty spaces. For most of the trial, there was standing room only.

Presiding over the court was Judge W.W. Brown (no relation to Steve Brown), a small, ruddy-faced gentleman with a corncob pipe and scrolls of graying blond hair. The center aisle quickly became the line of demarcation for the crowd's loyalties. Those supporting the Browns congregated on one side, those supporting the Miskelleys sat on the other, while the undecided spectators shuffled back and forth to honor both families. The two families themselves sat in reserved seats in the front.

Each day at noon, a group of Falkner women served box lunches out of one of the offices downstairs. Spectators who had good seats often refused to leave during the lunch break for fear of losing them. School was unofficially called off for the Falkner students, and most of them showed up every day, either as spectators or witnesses. ("They turned out like vultures for a piece of meat," says Luckett today.) Maurine Bain, the county court clerk, said it was the largest and most emotional crowd she'd ever seen in a courtroom. "I was scared the upper floor would cave in from the weight of all those folks," she said.

The one person who was careful not to show up was John B. Farese, the influential Ashland attorney. There were two reasons for this. First, since Bill Luckett was in son-in-law, Farese didn't want to create the impression that he was involved in the case in any way. Second, there was the conflict of interest problem with John Riemenschneider. So Farese went out of his way to be neutral. He even refused to allow his office secretaries to walk over to the trial. "It was like Barnum and Bailey had come to town," recalls Luckett. "They were putting on a circus in Farese's back yard, and he couldn't even look out his window.

PRELIMINARIES

The first three days of the "circus" were uneventful. The prosecution had to prove throught the use of forensic experts that the body found in the Benton County woods was, indeed, Steve Brown. It was also necessary to establish the corpus delicti, literally, "the body of the crime." The State had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there had been a crime, that Steve had been killed by a gunshot wound to the head.

This would have been a routine matter had the state pathologist, Dr. Rodrigo Galvez, shown up for the trial. It is standard procedure for the pathologist to testify in murder trials to establish corpus delicti. As it happened, Dr Galvez had undergone back surgery in Jackson a few days earlier. "He couldn't even get out of bed, much less testify in court," Kenneth Coleman later explained.

Luckett tried to use Galvez's absence to raise three points. First, he questioned why Dr.

Galvez, in his report, had failed to mention the several fractures that appeared on Steve's skull. Luckett argued that the fractures presented the possibility that Steve had been beaten as well as shot. (Here, Luckett implied that it was highly unlikely that someone as small as Miskelley - he was 5'5" and 130 pounds- would be powerful enough to assault a larger and stronger boy like Steve Brown in this way, particularly since Mike was wearing a leg cast at the time.)

Second, Luckett questioned why the prosecution had built its case around the unqualified assumption that Steve died from a head wound caused by a .22 caliber bullet, when Galvez had only specified "a projectile, small caliber (.22?)" in his report. What was more, Luckett said, the prosecution was attempting to create the impression that the bullet which killed Steve Brown was one of the same projectiles the authorities found in the woods, and, further, that it was fired from Steve's Mossburg rifle. Yet John M. Allen, the State Firearms Examiner in Jackson, had concluded in his report: "It is the finding of this examiner that the projectiles and cartridge cases in [these] exhibits were not fired in the [Mossburg] gun." It was determined, in fact, that the projectiles were fired from a Marlin rifle. So the exhibits were only props, Luckett maintained, with no relevance to Steve Brown's death.

Third, Luckett claimed that the firearms experts whom he consulted had never encountered a situation in which a .22 caliber bullet was powerful enough both to enter and exit a human skull containing a living brain. Was it possible that the bullet holes were caused subsequent to Steve's death, after his brain had decomposed?

The defense attorneys were willing to acknowledge that the remains belonged to Steve Brown, but they claimed the State had not proven the other crucial element of corpus delicti, criminal agency. "Well, I will say to you they have probably proven that Steve Brown is dead," conceded Luckett's assistant, Robert Norman, to a Commercial Appeal reporter. "But that's all they've proven. They have not developed the proof you need to send this man to jail."

The focus of inquiry then shifted to the details surrounding the discovery of Brown's body. The prosecution maintained that Mike shot Steve in the woods behind Blackwell Church and immediately buried him in a shallow grave nearby. Kenneth Dickerson said he found a slight depression "of somewhat precise design" In the ground about thirty steps north of Steve's skeletal remains. He claimed the hole was three feet deep, three feet wide, and six feet long. He originally concluded that it was the grave alluded to in Tammy's statement, theorizing that the buried remains had somehow washed out during heavy rains. But when the defense pressed Dickerson to describe this "grave" more specifically, he admitted that he wasn't sure what it was:

Q. Let's get right to the point if we can, Mr. Dickerson. Are you saying that's a grave?

A. I'm saying it's a depression or hole. I'm not just...

Q. You're not saying it's a grave?

A. I'm not saying it's a grave.

Q. Could have been any number of reasons for that hole. Is that not true, sir?

A. Well, yes, sir.

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The defense attempted to show that the State had reneged on a deal which it had allegedly made with Mike Miskelley involving the polygraph test back in May of 1981. Mike testified that Sheriff Crum had promised to strike him as a suspect if he voluntarily submitted to the lie detector test in Jackson and passed it. Though Mike testified that polygraph examiner Donald Bray told him he clearly passed it, Bray claimed the test was "inconclusive". (All of this testimony, incidentally, including the factual descrepancy, was recorded in chambers- out of the hearing of the audience and jury- because polygraph tests are legally inadmissible as evidence in a courtroom.)

Defense witness Timmy Hopper then testified that he saw Steve Brown at the Falkner High ag shop around 6:30 on the night he disappeared. Luckett emphasized that if Hopper was telling the truth, i t would have been impossible for Miskelley to have committed the murder. The other two boys in the building that evening, Jerry Barkley and Randy Moore, testified that they saw someone who looked like Steve, but conceded that they could have been mistaken. Fearing that the prosecution had coerced Barkley and Moore into changing their stories to convey uncertainty, the defense discouraged Hopper f rom talking with anyone before taking the stand. But Hopper stood by his earlier account of the sighting, much to the chagrin of Kenneth Coleman and his assistant, Chuck Easley, who naturally tried their best to discredit him on cross-examination. ("I felt like I was badgered up there," Timmy Hopper said in a recent interview. "Easley tried to twist my testimony around so the jury would somehow forget what I was saying. I saw Steve Brown that night. It was that simple.")

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The case for the defense took a turn for the worse, however, when, on direct examination, Mike Miskelley revealed what many thought to be an unconvincing account of his activities on the afternoon of March 23, 1981. After dropping Steve off at the Bank of Falkner. Mike claimed he picked up his paycheck at Griffin's Grocery, bought some gas, then turned around and headed back out Highway 370 toward Benton County to pick up a six-pack of Budweiser he had bought from a local bootlegger. It was stashed in the woods less than a mile from the site where Steve's remains were discovered. Miskelley testified that he opened up a beer, but it was too warm to drink. He put the beer in the car and headed toward home. Then he tossed the sack of beer in an old junk pick-up truck about 300 yards from his house. Mike testified that he and Luckett later went out to the site of the abandoned truck, and that the beer was still there with cobwebs on the sack. Luckett conceded that Mike's last-minute maneuvering to pick up the beer stash was "a drive I wish he hadn't made," but insisted his client's explanation was the correct and truthful one.

The State, however, offered several witnesses who testified that they saw Mike driving back from Benton County at an extremely high rate of speed. They said he was driving recklessly. Miskelley claimed he was driving fast because he had lost track of time and wanted to return before his father got home. Of course, the State argued that Mike was speeding home from the scene of the crime in the Benton County woods.

STAR WITNESS

Tammy Glissen Nance's testimony would be the centerpiece for the prosecution. She was the star witness, the "prosecutrix," as Luckett called her. "Her statement was the crucial, pivotal thing," agreed District Attorney Kenneth Coleman, reviewing the trial in a recent interview. "Everything else was just window-dressing. In that sense the case was quite simple; it all boiled down to whether those twelve men and women on the jury believed her or not."

So when she finally climbed to the witness stand on the third day, all eyes were watching:

...Mike said he would tell me on his deathbed...He said he would go to hell. Then, one day on the phone, he said he had something to tell me. I told him to tell me what it was. I told him if he didn't tell me, that I would hate him...

He told me [the next day, in the high school auditorium] that he did this for me. He thought Steve was coming between me and him. He done it for a four-letter word called L-O-V-E. He said he had gotten mad Sunday and went and dug a hole... He talked Steve into going hunting with him on Monday. He said that they got to the woods. Mike seen the hole that he had dug the Sunday before, and he knew he had to do what he come to do, but he couldn't do it...

Tammy's voice broke with emotion at this point, and she began to cry. The Browns also began to weep, and then a wave of tears swept back through the audience.

Most of the crowd was shocked by Tammy's testimony, for her earlier accusations of Mike had never been openly revealed or reported in the papers. Many people were hearing the details for the first time. Tammy continued...

He said that he turned his head and pulled the trigger, and he turned around. He said Steve took a step and he took another one and went to his knees and just looked at him, and Steve mumbled something, and he gradually fell to the ground.

I just wanted to know more. I asked him how it looked, and he said it didn't look bad. he said that he leaned up against a tree and cried. He said he loved Steve, but he loved me more. He said that i t only took one. Said it hit him behind the left ear. He touched my head where. I asked him did he have blood in his blond hair, and he said, "Yeah. He didn't look bad, he just had a little blood running out his nose." He said he buried him. He said Steve was heavy. He said that he put the gun with him. I asked him how did he cover up the thing to keep it from being seen, and he said he used the shovel to cover it up, and that's all he told me that day.

Luckett called Tammy Glissen's testimony and "outright lie." In a direct examination of Miskelley on the stand, Luckett drew out a different version of this "confession." Mike testified that he once offered a "false" admission in a kind of "flippant," off-hand manner. He maintained that Tammy continually nagged him for weeks, imploring him to tell her the "real story." He said she prodded him every day until her suggestions "finally got on my nerves." He said she threatened to "hate me if I didn't tell her the truth." Then one day during class Tammy said, "You killed him, didn't you? You killed Stevie."

Miskelley said he decided to go along with her so "she'd get off my back."

"Sure, Tammy," he whispered, " I done it."

"You buried him, didn't you?"

"Sure, Tammy."

"After the disappearance," Luckett argued in chambers, "Tammy started continually badgering him, harassing him, causing herself to be a nuisance to him, picking on him, trying to get him to say something or admit things to her when she would suggest answers. Then it turned, your Honor, into more of a coercive-type affair where she would tell him she wasn't going to love him and this sort of thing if he didn't talk to her, and she would use the sex bribe, in a sense, against Mike Miskelley repeatedly, and then she'd go out with him and they'd have sex again and then she'd start going to work on him again..."

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After the prosecution rested its case on the third day, Luckett directed most of his energies toward an attack on Tammy's credibility. Tammy maintained that after Mike "confessed" in May of 1981, she broke off all romantic relations with him. She said they were simply friends after this. It would be unseemly, of course, for her to admit before the throng of Falkner residents that for months she had privately dated and engaged in sexual relations with the very person whom she now publicly claimed was the murderer of her former boyfriend. Luckett tried to show that this was precisely what Tammy had done.

First, the defense attorney produced several love notes which Tammy had written to Mike when they were seniors at Falkner High School- during the 1981-82 school year. Some of them she copied out of old poetry books; others she composed herself, like the one she titled, "My Endless Love." There was this piece of doggerel, for example, written in Tammy's flowery hand on a folded sheet of erasable bond with torn edges:

The violet loves the sunny bank,

The cowslip loves the lea,

The scarlet creeper loves the elm,

But I love only thee.

Love ya, Tammy!

After Luckett asked her to identify the notes, Tammy Glissen Nance reluctantly acknowledged that she had authored them.

Next, Luckett called Lawrence Jay Roberts to the stand. Roberts had been Mike's boss at the Sonic Drive-In during the summer of 1981. Roberts testified that Mike and Tammy met privately at his apartment in Ripley many times. He said he even gave Mike a set of keys so the couple could have a place to rendezvous without their disapproving parents suspecting anything."They were lovers," Roberts testified. "I mean, most of all of us knew it."

During his cross-examination of Tammy, Luckett finally broached the subject of her relationship with Mike during the crucial period after the alleged confession:

Q. Were you unfriendly [with Mike] because of what you say he told you in May of 1981?

A. He was my friend.

Q. In spite of the fact that you say he told you that he killed Steve Brown, whom you loved?

A. Well, I told him he was my friend. I done a lot of things that I didn't want to do...

Q. You loved Mike, didn't you?

A. I told him I did.

Q. But did you really?

A. No, sir.

Q. How long did this go on, where you were telling him you loved him and yet, really didn't?

A. A long time.

Q. Were you just fooling him?

A. Well, I wanted to win his trust back. He didn't trust me after I had done told what he had told me the first time. He didn't trust me.

Part of Luckett's strategy was to portray Tammy as a femme fatale, in his words, "a little kid dreamer who reads teen magazines, watches soap operas, and fantasizes that boys would go out killing people for her." Luckett sought to show that Tammy Glissen Nance was a restless romantic with a long list of boyfriends. Luckett showed that, apart from her secret meetings with Miskelley,

Tammy was "pre-engaged" to Steve Brown in July of 1980; that she was engaged to a man named Junior Carpenter around Christmas of 1981; that she eloped with a third man named Ronnie Bobo to escape "family problems" later in 1981 and sought a civil marriage in Alabama. (The justice of the peace there denied them a license because Tammy was a minor. He then notified the Glissens, who authorized a juvenile officer to pick her up.) Thereafter, Tammy started dating a fourth man, John Nance, whom she married in November of 1982.

Much of this evidence would have been hot news for the audience and jury alike, but most of it was presented in chambers, out of public hearing. Judge Brown consistently sustained the prosecutor's objections to Luckett's cross-examination of Tammy, regarding her alleged promiscuity, her relations with Mike, and her love notes. This was the kind of conversation that went on in chambers during much of the trial:

Defense Counsel: "Your Honor, there are lots of questions I want to ask this witness pertaining to matters that took place after this disappearance..."

The court: " What is the nature of the things that you want to ask her about?"

Defense Counsel: "Well, going out with Mike Miskelley, sexual intercourse with him, various places they went, secret meetings, notes written, all of which she has denied in statements to us..."

District Attorney: "You're talking about things that are totally irrelevant, immaterial."

Defense Counsel: "Your Honor, I don't believe so. I think they are very probative. The State is trying to paint a case of a fight over a girl, and we're trying to show that she had other interests as well..."

The Court: "Well, I don't see where the sexual life of someone has any probative value whatsoever. It's nothing but an assassination of her character...I'm going to sustain the objection on the basis of this sex thing... You're going to stay out of the sex business."

Defense Counsel: "...They put this girl on the witness stand who appears to be the Virgin Mary and who says she loved Steve Brown and says she's just friends with Mike Miskelley. But these love poems don't say that to me. I think the Jury has a right to look at these poems that she gave to him. The Court can see by reading through these verses...that they [weren't ] just friends."

This kind of legal posturing went on for two days; the exchanges were fast-paced and heated, moving in and out of chambers so briskly, and amid so much confusion, that many in the audience felt they had missed the heart of the trial. "Half the proceedings when on in chambers," recalls

Ashland Mayor Bill Rennick. "And you think people found that a little funny? You bet they did."

Each time Luckett would raise a new point about Tammy's testimony, the attorneys would have to adjourn to the back room to hash it out. Five minutes later they would reemerge, and more often than not, Judge Brown would clear his throat and remark, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I admonish you to desregard that last comment. Please strike it from your memory."

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Finally, on the fifth day, it came time for the attorneys to present their closing arguments. Luckett maintained that the State had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Steve Brown died of criminal agency. He argued that Tammy was motivated out of a kind of romantic delusion to create a fictitious fight between the two boys over her love. As for her foreknowledge about the location of the bullet wound, Luckett dismissed it as "a lucky guess."

Kenneth Coleman, on the other hand, stressed in very direct language that jealousy had led Mike to plan and execute the murder of Steve Brown in Benton County woods. He claimed the entire case rested on the authenticity of Tammy Glissen Nance's pivotal statement given back in May of 1981, particularly her knowledge of the path of the bullet. And all along, Coleman emphasized Tammy's willingness to endure public derision in order to bring the defendant to justice. "None of the elements of this crime are dependent on circumstantial evidence," he argued. "We have, in this case, the statement of Tammy Glissen Nance that just keeps this case from being a circumstantial evidence case. Every element of this crime is covered by her statement."

Coleman then waved Steve's rifle in front of the jury. "Mike Miskelley took this rifle and killed Steve Brown," he admonished the jurors. "You must not let him go free."

VERDICT

Late in the afternoon of March 26th, Judge Brown had to ask the crowd to clear the aisle so the twelve jury members could shuffle back to the jury room, where they would decide the fate of Mike

Miskelley. It was a bright spring day in Ashland, and sunshine was streaming through the tall windows. The crowd sweltered in the moist heat of the hall. Bill Luckett loosened his tie and leaned over the rail of the outside balcony to escape the stuffiness. The inside warmth radiated from the open windows into the crisp air in a kind of framed mirage.

The crowd waited only 55 minutes for the verdict. A silence fell over what at times had been an unruly audience, as if now for the first time they were beginning to understand the seriousness of it all. The high celing echoed with the sibilance of discreet conversation; there were whispered reassurances, a last-minute hug, a muted cough, the cries of an infant.

At 4:45 p.m. the doors opened, and the eight-man, four-woman jury filed out. One of the members, Tate Peeler, who functioned as foreman, handed the verdict over to Maurine Bain, the county clerk. Her voice quivered as she read: "We, the Jury, find the defendant, Mike Miskelley,

guilty of murder."

Many in the audience gasped. All twelve of the jurors believed Mike Miskelley had killed Steve Brown (a guilty verdict requires a unanimous vote). Several women, including Ann Miskelley, broke down in tears. There was no outburst of approval from the audience, only a hush of solemnity and restrained emotion. Mike sat in silence, stifling his reaction so completely that many who were convinced of his innocence said they suddenly changed their minds. "If he was innocent," remembers Maurine Bain, "he was the coolest cucumber I ever saw."

("I swear to God, I showed more emotion when I heard the verdict than that boy," recalled Judge Brown during a recent interview at his Calhoun City home. "He looked like a mongoloid up there. Something must have snapped in his mind. Mentally, he didn't believe he did it. He had detached himself so completely from it, he didn't even wince. It was as if the verdict applied to someone else.

"His demeanor on the witness stand was not convincing of his innocence. If I were innocent, I'd look that jury in their eyes. I'd plead and beg and cry. They're humans, you know. They have feelings. If you show some emotion, a jury will help you out. Especially when you're going up against a girl like that one was.

"You know, a friend of mine leaned over to me after the trial was over, and told me, said, 'That little ole girl ain't even worth killing for.'")

Judge Brown read the sentence: "It's the duty of the Court, under the laws of the State of Mississippi, to sentence you to serve the remainder of your natural life in an institution to be designated by the Board of Corrections. You'll be in the hands of the sheriff."

-

So the Steve Brown case had come to an end. The citizens of Falkner lingered at the Benton County Courthouse to contemplate the significance of all the dirty linen that had been aired over the last five days. Mike Miskelley became an inmate at the Benton County Jail within an hour.

"I don't think we can ever forget the hurt," Steve's father told a reporter for The Commercial Appeal just after the trial. "But being able to get justice done makes it possible to have a positive outlook. We've gone through it for two years. We feel sorry for the Miskelley family for what they will be going through."

Meanwhile, Joe Gay, the Tippah County Prosecuting Attorney, posted a notice in Ripley encouraging all potential claimants to the $8,000 reward raised by the Steve Brown Search Committee to come forward now and state their case. Many residents were surprised that Tammy Glissen Nance did not drop her name in the hat since, after all, she was the one most responsible for Mike's conviction. So the money went to Danny Ross, the 15-year-old hunter from Corinth, who stumbled upon Steve's skull in the woods.

AFTERMATH

While Miskelley was adjusting to life as a convicted murdered inside the Ashland jail, the uproar over the trial grew in intensity all over Benton and Tippah Counties. The verdict shocked half the community. Many suspected the trial was somehow rigged. Some residents felt Mike had been convicted on purely circumstantial evidence offered by one emotional young woman in a dramatic courtroom setting with an unruly audience and a jury tainted by too much publicity. Others held that law-

enforcement officials had simply fired all their ammunition at the first and most convenient target- without bothering to explore other possibilities- in a politically-motivated strategy to satisfy the witch-hunt mentality prevailing in Falkner.

Many of these doubts were captured in a letter which a woman named Janice R. White wrote in April of 1983 to the Ripley Southern Sentinel, entitled, "Is This Justice?'

That young man would have had to produce the person or persons responsible for the crime in order to prove his innocence to those so prejudiced against him... There are just too many unanswered questions for this to be let go... one set of suspicions prevailed over the other, and this, dear people, is terrifying... For some, I'm afraid this trial became an arena for vengeance against an atrocious crime where "someone" must be punished. Are you sure we didn't just look for "someone" to punish?

The evening after her letter appeared, Janice White received an anonymous phone call in the middle of the night. The caller hung on the line without saying a word. Soon, she was receiving harassing calls every day. These calls continued for about two weeks, culminating on May 8th, the day Janice White went to work and discovered that her heating and air-conditioning business- TIppah Refrigeration- had been burned to the ground. Her insurance company's investigator and the local fire marshal both determined that it was a case of arson. They said the fire was ignited by gasoline.

Janice White stopped receiving anonymous phone calls that day.

-

Meanwhile, well over one thousand Falkner-area residents had signed a petition calling on Governor William Winter to order a new trial. The petitioners were represented by locals Tate Rutherford and George Estell, who drove to Jackson to meet with Governor Winter's executive assistant, John Henegan. Henegan cordially received them, but pointed out that Mississippi law does not require authorize the governor to require additional trials for convicted felons. Henegan also said that Governor Winter did not believe in granting clemencies for convicts involved in cases where appeals were still pending. The Falkner citizens' group then visited the Mississippi Highway Patrol headquarters to lodge formal complaints about the investigation led by Kenneth Dickerson. (Dickerson had been awarded a letter of commendation for his "relentless devotion to duty" in the Steve Brown case.) John Edwards, assistant chief of the Highway Patrol, told a reporter for The Commercial Appeal he was surprised about the complaints. "My opinion is that it was a thorough investigation," he said, "and our people conducted themselves in a professional way."

APPEAL

Almost immediately, Bill Luckett set in motion the procedures required to appeal the Miskelley conviction. Appellant briefs were filed in October of 1983. But the appeal process has been slow. Since Mississippi has no intermediate court of appeals that reviews circuit-court rulings, the nine-member State Supreme Court must carry all the weight. As one might imagine, this kind of bottleneck creates a caseload that is often overwhelming. Consequently, Michael Wayne Miskelley v. State of Mississippi moved up the docket at a snail's pace. Over the next two years, the review date was postponed so many times that the Miskelleys eventually stopped inquiring about it.

On September 19th of this year, Bill Luckett finally was allowed to present oral arguments in Jackson. The Court convened at 9 a.m. in the plush surroundings of the new Mississippi Justice Building, a sleek marble structure near the State Capitol. As is customary, the Supreme Court was represented by a panel of three of its nine members: Justices Roy Noble Lee, Lenore Prather, and James L. Robertson. Representing the State of Mississippi was Assistant Attorney General Billy L. Gore, a slender, slight-framed man in his early forties. Bill Luckett was present, of course, looking as dapper as ever in a navy-blue three-piece suit and shiny black wing-tips. His client, Mike Miskelley, wearing a button-down shirt and dress slacks, sat just by the center aisle, accompanied by Leroy Meeks, the man who succeeded Pete Crum as Tippah County sheriff. An entourage of some 25 well-wishers had traveled down to Jackson from Falkner, and were seated around the courtroom.

The three justices focused their questions immediately and almost exclusively on what Luckett maintained was a fundamental error in the handling of the murder trial in Ashland: Judge W.W. Brown's refusal to give him enough latitude to thoroughly cross-examine Tammy Glissen Nance. Luckett argued that he should have been given every opportunity to question Tammy about her sexual relationship with Mike Miskelley, so that he might have had the chance to explore what he called "biases, prejudices, and inconsistencies" in her testimony.

Luckett asserted that Tammy's close romantic ties with Mike after his alleged confession were extremely relevant to the case. He claimed her behavior helped establish what he called a "sex-bribe theory" in which Tammy "paid Mike off" for his admission of guilt. That behavior also cast doubt on the veracity of her sworn statement; why else, Luckett argued, would a girl continue to date a person she claimed was the murderer of her deceased lover? In any case, Luckett claimed that Judge Brown had improperly interfered with the defense's conduct of the case, by deciding that questions like these were "totally irrelevant and of no probative value."

Assistant Attorney General Gore, meanwhile, argued that the evidence regarding Tammy's sexual ties with Mike was immaterial; Tammy Glissen Nance's sexual conduct, he asserted, had no bearing whatsoever upon her capacity to tell the truth. Then, Gore launched into a three-minute response to the rhetorical question which he posed himself, namely, "What is a virtuous woman?"

Gore's response was liberally sprinkled with Biblical quotations, and turned some heads in the chamber. The Supreme Court justices smiled, and then tried to zero in on what had obviously become the critical issue in the Miskelley appeal:

The Court: Let's get right down to it, Mr. Gore. What you are saying is that, without the testimony of Tammy Glissen Nance, the State's case would have utterly collapsed.

The State: I think so

The Court: And don't you think a defense attorney ought to be given wide latitude in cross-examing such a pivotal witness?

The State: Of course. But I don't think a person's sexual life has any bearing on the veracity of her testimony.

The Court: Don' t you think that it is possible that the subsequent relations between the boy and the girl might have been part of some payoff scheme, just as the defense has outlined?

The State: No, I don't.

The Court is expected to render a decision before the end of this year. There are three possibilities: (1) it can affirm the lower court's decision, in which case Mike would most probably be sent to the Parchman Penitentiary for the remainder of his sentence; (2) it can remand the case back to Bento County for a retrial; or (3) it can acquit Mike entirely.

The last opinion is considered highly unlikely. Many who have followed the case closely, however, expect the Court will order a retrial. While some are confident that fresh evidence will come out of a new trial, others fear it will only rekindle the hostilities and tensions that have characterized life in Falkner since the day Steve Brown disappeared.

NO VISIBLE SCARS

Mike Miskelley is now twenty. He has been confined to the Benton County Jail in Ashland for 33 months, where he spends his time polishing patrol cars and doing a little paperwork for the justice court clerk. Over time, he has become friendly with the deputies and with the sheriff. This past summer, he and a fellow inmate planted and harvested an impressive vegetable garden on a plot of land behind the jailhouse. Last spring, he enrolled in a correspondence course on Mississippi criminal law, to learn the mechanics of the court system that sentenced him to life behind bars- and has so far cost his family some $29,000 in legal expenses.

His most immediate fear is that he'll be sent away to the Mississippi prison farm at Parchman, an overcrowded compound with a rather dismal reputation for violence and homosexuality. But he says he's confident his luck will turn. "I haven't cried yet," he said. "The day I cry will be the day I give up." Indeed, it seems that Miskelley's luck might have already turned. He says that John Farese, who has been visiting him some at the jail lately, has expressed an interest in representing him in the future.

There are no visible scars in Miskelley's personality- only a kind of slow-burning frustration over the plodding pace of the court system. He seems light-hearted at times, extroverted, whimsical, like the old class clown of Falkner High. If there is fear or hate or cynicism, he somehow manages to keep those emotions inside. Last month he consulted a doctor about his stomach pains. He discovered that he had developed an ulcer.

Some of the citizens of Ashland have criticized Benton County Sheriff E.P. "Pat" Gresham for allowing Miskelley to serve out his sentence in such casual and agreeable surroundings as the Benton County Jail, where his friends and relatives visit regularly, and the clerks and deputies pass the time with horseplay worthy of The Duke of Hazzard. More than one person has suggested that Mike (the Ashland detractors refer to him as "the little red-headed bastard") ought to be sent away immediately to Parchman, where they claim he'll get the treatment he deserves.

Since the trial, Mike Miskelley's parents have stopped calling him "Slick." The hint of mischief still flickers in his eyes, but he doesn't even try to talk his way out of trouble these days. He has, in fact, lost faith in words. Under his bed in his cell, he keeps manila folders stuffed with reams of documents from his case- literally thousands of pages of affidavits, motions, briefs, transcripts, news clippings, and legal pads scribbled with notes. There was a time when he studied them every day, hoping to find some obscure reference or peripheral fact that might lead to an acquittal. "They don' t interest me anymore," he says. He remains, however, self-deprecating, and full of anecdotes.

"I ain't bitter at nobody," he said recently, "except Tammy, of course. You know, I've burned all

my pictures of her since the trial."

One can't help but ask him why, if he is indeed innocent, he continued to remain involved with the girl who had called him a murderer. Miskelley apparently has asked himself the same question: "I don't know why I ever got mixed up with her. It was something about her, something about that big, big smile and those legs. Gosh, everybody was kind of crazy about her, I reckon. In Falkner, a girl like that can win things."

And what if his appeal is successful? Miskelley put down the Coke bottle in his hand and shrugged his shoulders. "Some people say, you know, 'You ought to get out of Mississippi.' But I don't have plans to leave Mississippi. This state's not so bad. It's the people who run it."

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

It is nearly five years since Steve Brown vanished, and almost three years since a jury in Ashland convicted Mike Miskelley of his murder. Yet time has done little to provide answers to many of the questions still unresolved in this most controversial homicide case. Whether the Mississippi Supreme Court sends Miskelley to Parchman or decides to start all over again, the questions will remain.

Why, for example, were only a few scattered skeletal remains found in the Benton County woods on December 27, 1982, and what happened to the rest? Why were there fractures in Steve Brown's skull? Why was his rifle stuck barrel-down in the creekbed, as if someone were conspicuously displaying the gun, to insure its discovery? Why were there tire tracks at the site, and why had other deer hunters who regularly traversed the area never seen the remains- or at least the rifle- before?

Why did the authorities move so quickly to indict Miskelley after Steve Brown's body was discovered, apparently without investigating other potential suspects, in light of the peculiar circumstances surrounding the discovery of the remains?

At Miskelley's trial, why was so much attention focused upon the testimony of Tammy Glissen Nance, and so little upon that of Timmy Hooper, who maintained unswervingly that he had seen Steve Brown in town after the afternoon hunting trip?

Who was responsible for the arson that destroyed Janice White's business? Was it just coincidence that this occurred immediately after her letter criticizing the trial verdict was printed in the Ripley newspaper?

Finally, if Mike Miskelley had indeed been proven guilty beyond all reasonable doubt- as the prosecution maintained and the jury agreed- why did over one thousand local residents sign a petition calling for an immediate retrial? Was there more information about the case that never was revealed during the trial?

Then there are other questions, the ones that surfaced over the past eight months, while this article was being researched and written. Why, for example, did the editors of this magazine receive several calls from anonymous "concerned citizens" who urged Memphis not to publish this story? Why was its author often followed and watched when he visited Falkner and Tippah County in connection with the research? And why did at least one local law-enforcement official seek to prevent the story's publication by threatening a source who was providing confidential information?

There could be, of course, very simple answers to these three questions. The people of Tippah County are deeply suspicious of outsiders, particularly when the outsiders are perceived as "city slickers" with little understanding of the subtleties and sympathies of rural life.

No doubt this sense of distrust was responsible for at least some of the reticence and hostility encountered as this story was compiled. But was there more to that hostility than simply the natural antipathy that exists between two very different worlds? That, perhaps, is the heart of the matter.

EPILOGUE

Though the tragedy of Steve Brown's death still divides this small rural community- and doubts linger in the aftermath of the Miskelley trial- the observable life of Falkner, Mississippi,

continues from season to season with only slight variations in detail. The deer hunters in their orange caps and camouflage jumpsuits still sit around in the Falkner Cafe, sipping warm coffee

between stories. The farm machinery continues to rust out in puddles of stagnant water. Wisps

from the cotton harvest litter some of the roadside ditches, blending softly with the glaze of an early morning frost. And over at Thomas Glissen's place, the hillside awakens with the shrill crowing of a hundred gamecocks.

Pete Crum, who lost his bid for reelection as county sheriff in 1983, now works for the Hill Brothers Construction Company of Tippah County. Wayne Miskelley still works as a contract electrician; he's currently working on a project in Georgia. Timmy Hopper now attends Northeast Mississippi Junior College. Tammy Glissen Nance has been driving every morning to work in Blue Mountain, at the IMC plant there that manufactures cat-box litter.

In the evening, the Falkner water tower shimmers in the somber orange radiance of the harvest moon. The Future Farmers of America gather round the ag shop after school as Dwight Brown outlines his strategies for winning the big contest next month. And the Falkner Eagles, their black-and-gold uniforms stained with red dirt, huddle over the last patch of dead grass by the endzone, in the shadows of the stadium lights on a crisp autumn night, as the cheerleaders sing to the crowd:

We've got eagle power

It's the greatest power on this earth

Don't have to run, run

Don't have to hide, hide

Cause we got eagles on our side

Sometimes we're up, up

Sometimes we're down, downstairs

But our feet are always on the ground

Together we stand, stand

Divided we fall, fall

We're gonna fight till we do it all!

Editor's Note: On Wednesday, November 6th, as we went to press, the Supreme Court of Mississippi reversed the decision of the jury in Benton County Case No. 2904, a decision that had resulted in the conviction of Mike Miskelley for the murder of Steve Brown. The Supreme Court ordered that conviction overturned, and Mike Miskelley set free on bond until such time as District Attorney Kenneth A. Coleman sets a date for a new trial.

The decision was unanimous, with one justice abstaining. In its fifteen-page opinion, the Supreme Court agreed with the defense's contention that Benton County Circuit Court Judge W.W. Brown had indeed "unduly restricted cross-examination" of Tammy Glissen Nance, and that such cross-

examination was "crucial" if Mike Miskelley were to have a fair trial.

"In our jurisprudence," wrote Presiding Justice Roy Noble Lee for the Court, "cross-examination of a witness is a valuable right which may not be infringed upon or bridled. Cross-examination is one of the most potent tools in the trial of lawsuits to ascertain the truth of a matter. When there is doubt as to the relevancy of the examination, the scales should weigh heavily in favor of admitting the examination."

Mike Miskelley is expected to be released on bond from Benton County Jail in Ashland sometime in early December.

2009-05-05T15:44:00.000-07:00

OPINION: [*1104] Mike Miskelley was indicted and tried in the Circuit Court of Benton County, Mississippi, [*1105] for the murder of Steve Brown. The jury found Miskelley guilty as charged and the lower court sentenced him to serve a term of life in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Miskelley assigned twenty-eight (28) errors in the trial below, but briefed and argued only nine (9) of those assignments of error.

The Facts

The principal actors in this case are Mike Miskelley, the appellant, age 15; Steve Brown, the victim, age 15; and Tammy Nance, age 16. Tammy Nance and Steve Brown began dating in 1979, [**2] when Tammy was in the ninth grade and Steve was in the eighth grade. About Christmas, 1980, they decided to date other young people, and terminated their steady relationship. After Christmas of 1980, appellant began seeing a lot of Tammy Nance and dated her regularly until about March 19, 1981, prior to the disappearance of Steve Brown on Monday, March 23, 1981. Tammy Nance and Steve Brown started dating again on Saturday, March 21, 1981, and on Sunday, March 22, 1981, Tammy met the appellant at church and informed him that she had a date with Steve Brown the next evening. They were supposed to go to Corinth on Monday, March 23, 1981.

Steve Brown went to school on Monday, March 23, and stayed after school for baseball practice. The last time he was seen alive by his family was around 3:30 that afternoon. The appellant called Steve Brown during the afternoon and asked him, if he wanted to go hunting. Steve agreed to go and appellant picked him up after ball practice on the steps of the high school around 4 or 4:15 p.m. He was sitting with Dwayne Hopkins and was carrying a .22-caliber Mossburg rifle, which his father had given him.

Appellant testified in his own defense. He [**3] said that when he got home from school on the afternoon of March 23, he called Steve Brown and inquired if Steve wanted to go hunting with him. Appellant picked Steve up at school in his car around 4 p.m. They went target shooting in the woods near Little Hope cemetery back of the Blackwell church and to a nearby lake and back to appellant's car. Appellant and Steve returned to Falkner, he dropped Steve off in front of the Bank of Falkner, and that was the last time he saw Steve Brown. Appellant further testified that he picked up his paycheck at Griffin Brothers Grocery store where he worked part-time; that he remembered stashing some beer near the county line and got it, drank one can, and hid the remaining cans of beer in an abandoned pickup truck near his home so that his parents would not find out about his drinking beer; that he went home and the next time he heard anything about Steve Brown was when Steve's father came to his home around 7:30 or 8:00 that night, told him that Steve was missing, and inquired where they had been. Appellant joined in a search for Steve and about 11 p.m., the fire department, county officials and other people conducted a full-scale search. [**4] It continued for approximately two (2) weeks, but no sign of Steve was found.

Tim Hopper testified for the defendant/appellant that he had seen Steve Brown at school on the night of March 23, around 7:00, when he attended a Future Farmers of America meeting at the high school. However, his testimony was impeached by one Jerry Barkley, another student, who testified in rebuttal that Tim Hopper had told him he really didn't know, if it was Steve Brown he had seen that night.

After March 23, 1981, appellant and Tammy Nance resumed dating. According to appellant, she continually questioned him regarding Steve's disappearance and claimed to love Steve and wanted him found. Tammy Nance asked appellant over and over where Steve was and appellant always stated that he did not know. Finally, she said, "You killed him, didn't you?" Again, according to appellant, Tammy Nance asked him every day at school and called him at home about the whereabouts of Steve Brown, and said, "If you [*1106] don't tell me where Steve is, I ain't gonna' love you no more." Finally, appellant said, "Yes, Tammy, sure, I did it, I killed him." Tammy Nance then would say to appellant that he had buried Steve [**5] and appellant said that he admitted it just to shut her up. During this period of time, Tammy Nance was providing sexual favors for appellant.

Pertinent parts of Tammy Nance's testimony taken from the abstract follow:

Steve and I began dating when I was in the 9th grade and he was in the 8th. On March 23, 1981, Steve and I had an agreement in effect by the terms of which we had decided to date other people. However, we had a date for that night. I had not dated anyone else. I had not dated Mike Miskelley. I went places with Mike Miskelley but I didn't call them dates. Mike Miskelley was a "real close friend. I really cared for him. He was very nice to me." On the 23rd of March, 1981, Steve Brown and I had made plans to go to Corinth that night to get him a pair of tennis shoes. He had had a date the Friday night before his disappearance and on that Saturday, we got back together. On Sunday, March 22, 1981, I saw Mike Miskelley at church, Pleasant Hill Baptist Church. I told Mike that I was going to go with Steve the next night. Mike got up and left church. The following morning, March 23, 1981, I went to school, and I recall seeing Steve Brown at school that day. [**6] . . .

Cross Examination of the

The first night, when Steve Brown disappeared, I questioned Mike Miskelley regarding
Steve's disappearance. I asked whether or not he knew where Steve was. Mike responded that he did not, that if he knew where Steve was, he'd go find him. About the 1st of May, Mike Miskelley began to tell me that he had something to tell me, that he would tell me on his death bed. One night on the telephone he mentioned that he had something to tell me, and I told him that if he didn't tell me I would hate him and he said, "Okay, I will tell you." Then he told me that it was about Steve. That's all he said. The next morning in the auditorium at school, he said that he did this for me; that he thought Steve was coming between me and him, and that he done it for a four-letter word called love. He said he'd gotten mad the Sunday before Steve disappeared, he said that he dug a hole, and he said that the next morning he talked Steve into going hunting with him. He said he picked Steve up at school and headed down Highway 370. He said Steve didn't talk much, but that they talked about bulldogs and the band that was at school that day. He said that when they got to the woods, he didn't [**7] have his gun, but Steve had his. He said that they set up a bottle and shot at it with Steve's rifle. He said that they "went on up into the woods." He said he saw the hole that he had dug and he knew he had to do what he had come to do. He said he turned his head and pulled the trigger, and then he turned around. He said Steve took a step, and then another one, and then went down to his knees and just looked at him. He said Steve mumbled something, then fell. I started crying. Mike asked me not to cry. Then I settled down; I just wanted to know more. I wanted to know where, and I asked him how it looked, and he said "it didn't look bad." He said he loved Steve but he loved me more. He said it only took one; he said it hit Steve "behind the left ear." I asked him did he have blood in his blond hair? He said he buried Steve Brown, together with Steve's rifle. I asked him how he covered it up to keep it from being seen? Mike said he used "the shovel to cover it up." That's all he told me that day; he never told me where. Later on I asked him where, because I wanted Steve to be found. I loved Steve and I wanted him to be found. Mike said he couldn't tell me where. Tammy Nance reported to her father appellant's admission, and Sheriff Crum and Highway Patrol Investigator Kenneth Dickson were made aware of it. She made a statement about the admission to them one week later on May 18, 1981.The investigators [*1107] requested appellant to take a lie detector test using "the best examiner in the State of Mississippi," a highway patrol examiner in Jackson, Mississippi. Appellant, his father and mother, agreed that appellant should take the test and went to Jackson where appellant underwent the polygraph examination.

Nothing further developed in the investigation until December 27, 1982, (21 months since the disappearance of Steve Brown) when Danny Ross, who was hunting with his father and brother behind Blackwell church in Benton County, Mississippi, found a .22-caliber Mossburg rifle in a hollow tree in the middle of a small drain (branch). He retrieved the rifle and showed it to his father and brother, and the three returned to the location where they found human bones approximately two feet from the drain and a skull which was about six or seven feet away. Authorities were summoned, and the area was searched with the result that a human [**9] lower jawbone with braces on it was found. Steve Brown's dentist and orthodontist identified the jawbone as Steve Brown's through his dental records. The .22-caliber Mossburg rifle was identified as that belonging to Steve. The skull found lying on its side had a hole behind the left ear area with another hole in the front forehead area. These remains were approximately thirty (30) paces from a hole that apparently had been dug in the ground. n1

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - Footnotes - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

n1 According to Tammy Nance, before the remains were found, appellant told her that he shot Steve Brown behind the left ear with Steve's own rifle; and that he had dug a grave and buried him along with the rifle.

A Closer Look at Tammy Nance

Steve Brown disappeared March 23, 1981. He was last seen by his family at approximately 3:30 p.m. on that day and was with, and last seen by, appellant around 5:00 to 5:15 p.m. The deceased and [*1109] Tammy Nance, the most crucial witness for the State, had been going together for about two years and around Christmas, 1980, they stopped seeing each other and [**15] began to date other people. Tammy Nance started going with appellant after Christmas, 1980, until March 19, 1981, four days before Steve Brown disappeared, when Tammy Nance and Steve Brown decided to start dating each other again. After the disappearance of Steve Brown, Tammy Nance and appellant resumed their relationship and began to date each other. According to appellant, on or around May 18, 1981, after persuasion, coaxing and sexual favors, he made statements to Tammy Nance that he had killed Steve Brown; that he had buried the body in a grave dug by himself; and that he had placed Steve Brown's rifle in the grave with him. The State's theory of the case indicates that appellant resented the fact that Tammy Nance broke up with him and was going to start dating Steve Brown again. Appellant contends that the testimony of Tammy Nance as to the confession was a result of coaxing, over-persuasion and threats to deny appellant sexual favors, and that there was no truth in the account by Tammy Nance.

Counsel for the State, in oral argument, admitted that, without the testimony of Tammy Nance setting out the confession/admission of appellant, the State could not make out a prima [**16] facie case against appellant. Therefore, the testimony of Tammy Nance is vital to this case and, likewise, the cross-examination of her is crucial to appellant's defense.

We set out from the briefs the following colloquys between the lower court and defense counsel, who was trying to cross-examine Tammy Nance on matters which he deemed important to the defense:
THE COURT: Alright. Objection will be sustained. You'll not refer to it anymore.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor, there are a lot of questions I want to ask this witness pertaining to matters that took place after this disappearance. This very confession she says Mike gave her was, I guess, spread over a long period of time culminating into something dated May the 18th, and I . . . if the Court, I want to make some ground rules now if you're going to restrict me on my cross examination on things that took place after. I think it's extremely important to the defense in this case, Your Honor. THE COURT: Alright. Objection will be sustained. You'll not refer to it anymore.

THE COURT: What is the nature of the things that you want to ask her about?
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Well, going out with Mike Miskelley, sexual intercourse with him, various places they went, secret meetings, notes written, all [**17] of which she has denied in statements to us and all of which we've got other independent witnesses to impeach her with. It goes to her credibility, and I feel we can attack it. This is the State's so-called "star witness" who testified that she has a statement of confession from Mike Miskelley. I feel we should be given latitude on cross examination to fully explore her credibility, Your Honor.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY: You're talking about things that are totally irrelevant, immaterial. They're so far removed in time that it could have no probative value. The only thing they can do is prejudice the mind of the Jury.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor, I don't believe so. I think they are very probative. The State's trying to paint a case of a fight over a girl, and we're trying to show that she had other interests as well, Your Honor, and there wasn't any fight over this girl.
THE COURT: Well, I don't see where the sexual life of someone may or may not have occurred after this occurrence is related to, has any probative value whatsoever. It's nothing but an attack and an assassination of her character is all it is. I don't see where it's the basis of setting up anything as to credibility. [**18] I think a person's life in that area is a very personal thing, and I'm going to rule that it's so prejudicial that it cannot contribute nothing to the case, and I think it's a collateral thing that has no [*1110] probative value, and I'm going to sustain the objection, and you'll not refer to it any further.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Well, Your Honor, then, I do want to make an offer in chambers on this.
THE COURT: Alright, sir.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor, it's important because of the fact that here's a girl that's just testified that she loved Steve Brown. She was good friends with Mike Miskelley. She loved Steve Brown so much, we're going to prove, Your Honor, that she had sexual intercourse with him long after Steve Brown disappeared, with Mike Miskelley. [Proffer made].

* * *
DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Your Honor, we object. They have no probative value. There's no way they can have any relevancy in this case. (Referring to Exhibits 34-38).
THE COURT: Alright. Objection . . .
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Your Honor, they show her state of mind in the period of time that is pertinent to this matter.
THE COURT: Objection sustained. They're marked for identification. They'll [**19] be with the record in that order.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: These notes, in effect, are telling Mike Miskelley that you love him very deeply, don't they?
DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Your Honor, now, we object to that.
THE COURT: Alright. Sustained.

* * *
DEFENSE COUNSEL: May I see the Court in chambers, Your Honor?
(IN CHAMBERS) Your Honor, the purpose of this line of questioning of this witness now that we're here in chambers, is to show the bias and prejudice on the part of this young girl in cooperating with law enforcement officers, who we're going to show, Your Honor, served upon her father a deposition subpoena that was requested to be served, in fact, issued by the Clerk of this Court on the same day the deposition was issued for us for this young girl. He got served. She left town, we think in a hurry, and the proof will also show that she's given an inconsistent statement about who took her out of town. We know it does show that, Your Honor. That's the purpose of this inquiry of her is to show a bias on her part.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: Were you intimate with her, she with you?
MIKE MISKELLEY: Yes, sir, seemed to be.
DEFENSE COUNSEL: What do you mean by that?
MIKE [**20] MISKELLEY: Well, we had sex.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY: Now, Your Honor, we object to that.
THE COURT: Alright, sustained.

* * *
DEFENSE COUNSEL: The Defense is going to show through this witness, if the Court allows it in front of the Jury, that this young girl had sex with this Defendant before this disappearance. After the disappearance, she started continually badgering him, harassing him, causing herself to be a nuisance to him, picking on him, trying to get him to say something or admit things to her when she would suggest answers. Then, it turned, Your Honor, into more of a coercive-type affair where she would tell him she wasn't going to love him and this sort of thing if he didn't talk to her, and she would use this sex bribe, in a sense, against Mike Miskelley repeatedly, and then she'd go out with him, and they'd have sex again, and then she'd start going to work on him again, and she'd get a little bit here and a little bit there, and all this, and that's exactly the scheme of the pattern that developed, Your Honor, and we have witnesses that are lined up that know about this sexual activity and all that totally contradicts what she said, and totally says that what Mike [**21] Miskelley says is true in this respect, and that's why I'm troubled. It shows the reason, the bias, the prejudice that this young [*1111] girl had and the way that she elicited over a period of time, as she testified to yesterday that she would get a little bit of information from him, but she said, of course, that he was just voluntarily coming to her. That's not the way it was at all according to Mr. Miskelley, and it's extremely important that we are able to show this to the Jury as to how she attempted and tried and coerced to elicit this information from him. That's why this is important. Now, I'm not going to ask this witness about any gory details of any sexual activity. I asked it as gently as I could in view of social mores and all, and that's as far as I intend to get into the nature of any acts she had, but the fact that she was using this type of coercion, this holding back, as she said, loving him was concerned, it is extremely material to this defense, and I think the Jury has a right to know all this. It may attack her credibility. I think it does because she denied it, but it also shows her reasons and her motivations and her coersive [sic] nature in the [**22] way that she was dealing with Mike Miskelley in the several months and back about a year following the disappearance and up till the time that this so-called confession was given and then after that, and that's why, Your Honor, it's extremely important to us.

SOUTHERN SENTINEL, Ripley, Mississippi March 26, 1981
Search Continues for 15-Year-Old Falkner Boy

Tippah County authorities are checking all possible leads in the disappearance of a 15-year-old Falkner youth who was last seen late Monday afternoon.
A search started around 9 o'clock Monday night for Steven Brown when he did not return home. Local law officers were joined by a large number of local people in search of the area that lasted throughout the night and into the day Tuesday. A Forestry Department plane and a helicopter from Holly Springs were called in to aid in the search.
Young Brown is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Brown of Falkner.
Sheriff Pete Crum urges anyone with information about the youth to please notify the Tippah County Sheriff's Department or the boys' father.
He is wearing a red quilted jacket, a maroon colored shirt and blue jeans when last seen.

SOUTHERN SENTINEL, Ripley, Mississippi January 20, 1983
Miskelly Indicted By Grand Jury; Attorney Will Ask for Lower Bond

A habeas corpus hear to consider the reduction of the $100,00 cash bond of Mike Miskelly has been set for 10:00 a.m. today, Thursday, January 20, at the Benton County Courthouse, according to James Pannell, attorney representing Miskelly.
Miskelly, a 19-year-old Falkner resident, was indicted for the murder of Steve Brown last Thursday, January 13, by a Benton County Grand Jury, stated Tippah County Sheriff Pete Crum.
Authorities presented evidence in the case of the slain Falkner youth to the grand jury impaneled by Judge W. W. Brown, Crum said, who learned of the indictment about 2:00 p.m. Thursday.
Miskelly surrendered to authorities in Benton County about 4:00 p.m. the same afternoon. His bond was set at $100,000. Crum said.
Miskelly was allegedly the last person to have seen Brown alive on March 23, 1981, the date he disappeared, according to earlier reports by authorities.
Following Brown's disappearance, a massive search was conducted by authorities, which continued for 21 months.
Brown's remains were found by an Alcorn County youth who was deer hunting December 27 in a wooded area behind Blackwell Church off Highway 370. Found along with the skeletal remains at the site were a rifle, belonging to Brown, and other evidence.
The remains were taken to the Mississippi State Highway Patrol Crime Lab in Jackson, where a positive identification was made by Dr. Michael West, a forensic odontologist of Hattiesburg.
According to investigating officers, an autopsy report, performed Monday, January 3, confirmed authorities' suspicions when the cause of Brown's death was determined to be "murder from, a gunshot wound." The victim had been shot once in the back of the head, according to the autopsy report.
Funeral services for young Brown were held Thursday, January 6,, in the chapel of the Ripley Funeral Home.
Miskelly's trial will probably be held in the March term of the Benton County Circuit Court, according to Sheriff Crum.

SOUTHERN SENTINEL, Ripley, Mississippi, January 6, 1983

SERVICES THURSDAY FOR STEVE BROWN
Funeral services for Steven Vance Brown will be held at 1:00 p.m. today, Thursday, January 6, 1983 at the Ripley Funeral Home Chapel. Officiating the funeral services will be the Rev. Billy Foley, assisted by the Rev. Floyd Beasley.
Burial will be in the Forked Oak Baptist Church Cemetery in Perntiss County.
A member of the Falkner Baptist Church, he is survived by his parents Mr. and Mrs. Dwight Brown; a sister, Melinda Brown of Falkner; his grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. J. L. Brown of Booneville and Mrs. Jessie Lee of Smithville.
Serving as pallbearers will be Mike Goolsby, Mike Childers, Jerry Childs, David Peeler, Michael Braddock, Phillip Bryant, Johnny Hodum and Terry McMillian.
Honorary pallbearers will be Greg Goolsby, Ashley Jones, Hugh Walker, Mike Peterson and Kelvin Crum.