Never a Number
A journalist, a murderer, an improbable friendship
NINE
Let Your Fingers Do the Walking ...
My first job out of Michigan State, reporting and editing for the local weekly, kept me in East Lansing until an ultimatum from a college girlfriend who’s own first job had landed her at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.
Someone had to relocate.
We mutually decided that someone should be me.
We toasted in a new year, 1976, and the next phase of our (short-lived) relationship at a Northern Virginia restaurant.
I soon realized my credentials couldn’t match those of other young journalists who shared a post-Watergate ambition of following Bob Woodward’s path from a suburban D.C. newspaper to the Washington Post.
Broke and desperate, I fired off a resume and clips to an afternoon daily seeking a reporter to cover cops and courts in a blue-collar Virginia outpost 250 miles to the southwest, and a world removed, from Washington.
The Martinville Bulletin (circulation 6,000) in mid-February invited me to a three-day tryout. I was hired on day two.
The following morning, the beat reporter I was replacing introduced me to the routine of daily check-ins at the Martinsville Police headquarters and Henry County Sheriff’s Office.
“Know anything about guns?” he asked as we made our way back to the newsroom where I would spend the next 18 months.
Zero, I confided.
“Well,” he advised. “Pretend you care about guns and these guys (cops and deputies) will tell you anything.”
I feigned an interest in firearms and, sure enough, the rank and file started passing along details of crimes the higher ups habitually withheld from incident and arrest reports.
The ploy cultivated the source who helped me break the first major story of my career.
Lt. James Kendrick and Investigator James Smith fancied themselves the Henry County incarnates of Starsky and Hutch, partners in a popular mid-70s cop show - the common bond being that the Southside Virginia sleuths, like the fictional television characters, holstered .357 magnums, sidearms with a six-inch muzzle.
Smith, an unapologetic southerner, made little effort to disguise his contempt for Yankees and reporters, not necessarily in that order. But my assumed fascination with his choice of weaponry convinced Kendrick I could be trusted to plow through a paper trail he hoped would bring about the downfall of his boss, Henry County Sheriff C.P. Witt.
With the now-deceased Kendrick as my guide, I pieced together an investigation an investigation prompted a grand jury to indict Witt on multiple counts of fraud, embezzlement, and malfeasance in office (charges later dismissed).
I hadn’t given Kendrick much though after leaving the Bulletin until the Washington & Lee law clinic forwarded digital transcripts of Brim’s trial, two pretrial hearings, and a recorded interrogation following his September, 1975 arrest for murder.
The questioning of Brim came straight from the good cop/bad cop playbook. Investigator Joe Louis Hairston, Henry County’s sole Black deputy, assumed the role of good cop; future source Jimmy Kendrick, the counterpart.
A transcript of the interview begins with Hairston advising the suspect of his right to attorney swiftly devolves into Kendrick bullying, cajoling and battering the befuddled Brim with theories about what occurred on the evening of September 16 when Brim ended a day-long bender at Moore’s trailer.
“You (are) telling so many tales, I tell you, it’s pathetic,” Kendrick tells the 21-year-old Brim. “It really is. A man can change his story so many times and then say that’s it. That’s the way it was...you went down (to) Lum Moore’s and started picking at him and you killed him, you took money...that’s the way it was.”
Brim: “No, no.”
Kendrick: Oh yes, it was.”
Hairston and Kendrick offer Brim a polygraph
“Why I want to take a polygraph when I don’t know what it is?” he asks.
Hairston: “You never heard of a (lie) detector machine?”
Brim: “That’s right...I don’t know nothing about it.”
Brim finally admits to grabbing an axe left outside the home to smash open the rear door of Moore’s residence. Moore confronted him after he entered the home after which, Brim said, the two men exchanged words - a verbal clash that ended with Brim shoving Moore, causing him to strike his head on a bedpost. Brim, without prompting, said he remained in the bedroom as Moore “jerk(ed)” and “shiver(ed)” on the floor before going home an hour or so later.
He denied entering the home to steal cash and a gun.
“(It) scared me,” Brim said, describing his reaction upon learning Moore had died. “...I was drunk that night...I didn’t know what I was doing.”
The confession raised a couple of issues, not the least being that Hairston, under oath at a January pretrial hearing, disclosed he “cut off” cassette recorder taping of the interview shortly after informing Brim of his right to counsel.
“...The conversation wasn’t going (anywhere),” he explained to Judge Hooker.
Kendrick, according to Hairston, proceeded to “open...a phone book” and, knowing Brim could neither read nor write, “told (Brim) if he wanted a lawyer then, to (look through) the Yellow Pages ... all of these right here are lawyers and pick you out one and we’ll call him.”
Hooker: “The thing that puzzles me, you gentlemen were aware of the fact that the defendant could not read. How did you expect him to pick an attorney out of the yellow pages if he didn’t know who was there?
“... That’s what I’m concerned about. How could he pick out one if he couldn’t read who was there?”
“Well, I don’t know just how he could do it,” Hairston acknowledged. “But we just told him, I mean there wasn’t anything there but attorneys (the Yellow Pages), (so) we just told him to pick him out one.”
Hairston further confided to switching the recorder on and off throughout the conversation.
Nor did the interrogation end with Brim confessing to pushing Moore into a bedpost.
Hairston told Hooker the questioning had, in fact, continued for nearly an hour after the investigators “ran out of tape.” A third law enforcement officer in attendance at that juncture took handwritten notes for what remained of the interview.
Testifying in the two pretrial proceedings and then Brim’s murder trial, Hairston relied on that account - by Virginia State Police Investigator M.R. Winn - to sway Judge Hooker’s verdict.
Brim, in the unrecorded narrative shared by Hairston, entered the home axe-in-hand whereupon he committed the act which, in the estimation of the incensed Hooker, merited sending him away for life.