Robert Stacy McCain: 'SPECIAL REPORT: Death in Clay County'

From Robert Stacy McCain, "Death in Clay County: The Green Room Goes Gonzo, or Fear and Loathing in Lower Glennbeckistan."

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So here I was alone, looking at the locked gate across Hoskins Cemetery Road. I wrote down the time in my notebook, got out of the car and took a few photos of the bridge and gate with my small Kodak digital camera. It was actually a lovely scene. The large hardwood trees lining the banks of the stream were still summer green in late September. The afternoon was cool and breezy, the sky was overcast with heavy clouds, and the only sounds were the wind in the trees and the quiet burbling of the little brook flowing east, parallel to Arnetts Fork Road.

Just then, I heard the sound of a car approaching from the direction of Big Double Creek Road. Standing by the roadside, I flagged down the blue sedan and approached the driver’s side window. The driver looked to be in her early 30s, and there was a child’s car seat in the back, but no child.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said to the lady, trying to smile as friendly as I could. “I’m a reporter, covering the murder y’all had up here.”

She nodded in recognition – obviously, the locals knew all about the case – and I continued.

“I’m up here to see the place where they found that fellow’s body and get a few pictures and, frankly, it’s kind of scary, y’know?”

She nodded again and said, “Yeah, I know.”

“So what I was wondering,” I said, “was whether you wouldn’t mind just waiting here for a few minutes, while I walk up to the cemetery – just wait here, to make sure I get back.”

She shook her head. “Well, I don’t think so, but I’ll tell you what. My husband’s up at the house” – she gestured westward up the hill – “and I can send him back down here, if you want.”

“Could you?” I asked. “About how long would it take him to get here?”

“About five minutes.”

Thus it was agreed, and I felt much better about my situation. No doubt her husband was a stout, hearty soul who would accompany me to the graveyard and assure my safety. Unless, that is, the lady’s husband was some hillbilly meth-cooker, a dangerously violent ex-con with deep hostility toward nosy outsiders and, for all I knew, the same guy who’d killed Sparkman.

Crazy fears like that crop up in a man’s mind when he’s short on sleep, hyped on coffee, far from home, and standing at the scene of a notorious crime in the Appalachian backwoods. But I’d wait for the lady’s husband to come back. He was probably a mild-mannered, clean-cut Baptist church deacon, and I was just being paranoid.

On the other hand, these woods were reportedly crawling with marijuana growers who plant their crops in isolated forest clearings, and late September is harvest time for these outlaw agriculturalists. Maybe there was some weeder, dressed in camouflage, rifle at the ready, guarding his crop planted nearby. Maybe, even at that very moment, I was a target in the crosshairs of a scope on a high-powered rifle held by a mountaineer marksman. One squeeze on the trigger and – boom! – that would be it for me.

Honestly, you think about things like that at such a moment, in such a place.

“Be careful,” my wife had told me before I left on this trip, which I’d undertaken against her advice. I reminded her I’d survived my 10-day excursion to Africa in February 2008. “If they didn’t kill me in Kampala, I think I’ll be all right in Clay County, Kentucky.”

There's going to be lots more where that came from.

Full post is at Hot Air.