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“Brap! Brap!” When a body falls on a dirt road, the sound doesn’t carry far, especially on a night in May. On May 3, 1992 the body of a fellow was discovered on Millers Church Road near Mullins. Two apparently fake suicide notes were discovered at the scene. No weapon. Go figure. “They printed my story. I couldn’t believe it.” On Jan. 21, 1994 my editor, the same asshole who finally fired me at the Florence Morning Piece-of- crap, was working past five, but not long. His chubby fingers jabbed at the keys, scrolling down, making a few changes quickly, scrolling up and down further until the end of the story. Then he scrolled back up and read it again. “Good story.” Good editing job. He could be a good editor when he wanted to. That afternoon I had uncovered a court document which led to the next day’s headline “Millionaire’s death remains unsolved despite settlement of insurance claims.” When the front glass door of the newspaper office had almost closed, I let out a blood-curdling shriek of joy that I knew would be heard by everyone in the newsroom. It was a good feeling. When a reporter breaks a story, it’s like busting a cherry, something I don’t think I’ve ever done. It’s much better than sex. The pride fills your soul for an hour or so after you type the “-30-” at the end of the story. The body on that dirt road had been a former college professor, Robert Allan Mensh, 47, who had moved into Marion County’s Zion community in November 1991 from Carson City, Nev. The week before Christmas: WBTW TV-13 in Florence had a Yuletide greeting and salute from local and regional merchants as a kind of holiday gesture and advertising tool. After the murder, one of them showed a woman, greeting the viewing audience. My groin was wet with spilled Budweiser as the sizzling end of my joint fell off my finger after burning its flesh and into my lap. It was Sharon Dale Alford, who wrote that religious column I was telling you about. She was the co-owner of Trader Dan antiques in Marion. In Potomac, Md. Mensh’s sister was left out of his will. The sister battled for the estate later. Mensh had met Alford when he moved to Zion and allegedly signed his fortune and a life insurance policy over to her shortly before his death, according to court records. His survivors weren’t even mentioned in the obit. Alford arranged the funeral through Richardson Funeral Home, owned by the county coroner, Jerry Richardson, a dead look-alike to Darryl Waltrip. He checked my pulse once. My story’s research had uncovered evidence that showed civil defendants were prepared to call two Mullins physicians in to testify, and that one of the docs was ready to swear that Alford had entered The Mullins Hospital “claiming she was in labor when she was not.” The other doc, her own physician, was getting ready to say that the lady had never been pregnant while in South Carolina. They were also going to call her former husband to testify that there had allegedly been a similar case involving her. “Do you understand what you are charged with?” the judge asked the defendant. “Yes sir,” replied Alford. Her warrant showed she had a scar on her stomach. She hadn’t been so silent when she was bitching with her husband to me once at the Mullins newspaper office about a girl whose arrest hadn’t been sufficiently reported upon. I knew she was trouble then. As a reporter, you have to be able to judge a person’s bull crap quotient as well as the psychotic quotient, an equation that Mensh probably never realized until after Alford’s nephew and his acquaintance, Anthony Leverne Genwright, led him down that dirt road that night. I was out of town and missed the murder that day. After the subsequent trial and convictions, her nephew, Thurman Rabon Jr., 27, of Rt. 2, Mullins, was brought to Margaret’s Lounge before he was shipped off to jail. I don’t know how his relative, his attorney, worked it out, but they did it. I was probably in there that night and was too drunk to know it. I don’t think I was there that night, however, but news of this greatly distressed me and caused me to cause a minor rampage when I learned of it at the bar on night. Alford was dressed in light brown wooden clogs and a prisoner’s suit of orange as she faced Magistrate William Hubbard as a SLED agent, Muldrow, ignited her cigarette as she awaited arraignment March 15. There was a lot of choir practice to follow, and to sing from the same hymnal, it takes a lot of religious fortitude. Mensh’s typewriter was supposedly used to type the two phony suicide notes addressed to Alford. Sheriff Bud Richardson told me Alford was “conniving” and “vicious.” The Mullins Drug Store crowd had a name for her after the sheriff, a big NASCAR fan, dubbed her in one of my stories as the “Queen Bee.” Over coffee, the crowd, which included an insurance agent, a loan officer and several other older fellow, would cackle over the nomenclature. When the Queen Bee was finally picked up for formal charges, the sheriff made a telephone call to a state representative, Morgan Martin of Conway, who represented her, so she would turn herself in. “I don’t know what we’re looking at,” Martin said after the arraignment. Martin is one of the best attorneys in the state, if not the best. He could probably get a Nazi off on a Jewish holiday. There had been one insurance policy for $125,000. The other one was for $605,000. “With love and affection for my friend” Mensh had signed the deed to his property to the Queen Bee on April 22, 1992. “Why aren’t you running my Alford story?” The new publisher of the Marion Star & Mullins Enterprise didn’t have a good enough answer for me. He was scared to print the story. “We can’t run this,” he said. So on Aug. 1, 1993, I applied to the Florence rag where the guy who interviewed me had a bottle of booze in his desk drawer. So when Judge Ralph King Anderson proclaimed that the Queen Bee would walk a free woman into house arrest with an electronic device strapped to her, I quickly banged out an article letting people know folks in Marion County were damned concerned she was on the loose. July 11, 1998/TO: Deuce Niven Loris/Tabor City Tribune (Pulitzer Award winning paper in N.C.) From: Tim Bullard good to see you at the speedpark. (i had a 9. or 8. something). ed piot. won....if my wife hadn’t gone to speak at the catholic church in loris tonight, i wouldn’t have seen that sickening letter to the editor in the tribune, and the story. i feel like throwing up and like someone jerked my stomach. i left the marion star after they wouldn’t print a story i did on this lady, and you should see the ones i did in marion. i lived in mullins when this murder happened. i’ve got to write a letter to the editor on this woman’s writing. you shouldn’t print anything else she says. i’m not quite sure if there may have been a story concerning her there before the july 8 thing, but take a look at this series of stories i did in florence and you’ll understand why morgan martin doesn’t win them all. morgan martin told me at a press conference in loris once that she asked about me....it scares me when people like her get a public audience, especially on a religion page...she’s manipulative, dangerous.......repulsive...... her husband was a rural usps carrier in mullins...i kinda felt sorry for him....it was a wild trial....didn’t cover much of it.....but you should have seen it when the victim’s family called and he was being buried at richardson’s funeral home (coroner’s f.home) before they were even allowed to go....alford was arranging the funeral....odd stuff....law enforcement dropped the case after about a year, and then sled and george muldrow got on it after i started finally referring to the victim , since there was insurance and he was worth it, as a “millionaire.” take it ez... i really enjoyed the buffet column!
************** Any anecdote about Elvis Presley stirs my south, so when Richard Jones of Myrtle Beach came in the office, he told me about when Presley was about to come on stage once. A local musician, Jones, 45, was a native of San Diego, and had played trumpet for the King in Arizona. “This happened about nine months before Elvis passed away. I had been hired as a backup musician for different artists for a number of years. I had worked with a lot of people in the business, and Elvis happened to be coming to the Arizona Coliseum, which held 15,000 people. “What happened is the night we were contracted to be the band, to be the backup band, we had scheduled to rehearse about four or five in the afternoon, and Elvis obviously didn’t show up for the rehearsal. He had his conductor there though, and his band was there.” Rehearsal lasted around 90 minutes. “The music was fine, and we were supposed to report back at a certain time. The concert started at 8 o’clock. So we got there at about 7, all dressed in tuxedos. At about 7:30 we were told it was time to go on the stage and sit there. At this point Elvis wasn’t in the building at all. We get ready to go up on stage, and we were sitting there. “The place was at capacity. You couldn’t get another person in there if you tried to. We’re over capacity, and we’re sitting there, and all of a sudden we here this, ‘Pssst! Pssst!’ - like somebody trying to beckon us from behind the stage. So we turn around, and there are some policemen back there waving for us to come off the stage.” Jones said everyone on stage got off stage faster than Joe Cocker grabbed a 50-gallon trash can once at the Greensboro Coliseum to puke once when I was at Appalachian. “They said there had been a bomb threat called in, and that there was a bomb planted underneath the stage, and they were going to blow all of us up. So needless to say, that worried a lot of the musicians a little bit. What worried the musicians more was when they started bringing the dogs in. Not that I did, but even in those days there were some musicians that tended to think that marijuana was a part of their normal life, so needless to say, they were all worried about these dogs going around and sniffing around their instrument cases. It turned out they were bomb- sniffing dogs, so they were all safe.” Everyone was nervous, and no bomb was found, so the musicians got back on stage. “Elvis was still not in the auditorium. I found out later on how Elvis and his crew worked. They would get the audience to start up and get them going. When we started playing Elvis’s opening song, at that point, they had radio people on a radio with Elvis in a limousine outside driving around. At the time the band started, they would contact the limo.” Jones said Elvis would then be escorted to the rear entrance and would hop out and run straight to the stage. “Likewise when the concert was over, everybody thought he was coming back for an encore because we kept playing, and he wasn’t. He jumped off the stage and in the limo and was gone before we had even finished the last number. It’s probably the most exciting entertainer I’ve ever worked with. And I’ve worked with a lot of people. He was just so popular with everybody. Even though he was overweight at the time, he came out and gave 200 percent. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard on stage as what he did. The crowd was just yelling and screaming. I get goosebumps just talking about it.” You normally have to size up someone you’re interviewing because I’ve met a lot of liars who tell tall tales you wouldn’t want your byline over. I believed Jones, and he gave me some sweet tapes of his wife, a singer. Jones said he had performed with Sammy Davis Jr., and I love celebrity stories, plus I loved Sammy Davis Jr. “Sammy was a real musician’s musician kind of person. After the show, Sammy would come back for an hour and sit with the band. Normally, he’d have a little bar set up back there for you. If you were done, even if he was in there for one night, he’d come back and have a bar set up for the band and hang with you for about an hour. He’d go on to tell you that without you, I’m really not anything. He loved to support musicians, unlike any other musicians I’ve ever worked with.” *********** A diminutive young man stood in the crowd of onlookers outside a Broadway theatre where a large black stage door swung open, and tall disheveled Irishman, 46, with long, unkept light brown hair emerged, reaching for a notebook to sign. It took me several months to get a week’s vacation, even when my boss looked me square in the eye and told me I had only been working there for two years, when it was in fact three. I didn’t get paid but for a week’s vacation of the two-week spree, but it was almost worth it to get away. I was far away from the night I had to crawl out of the back window to escape while the lady who did layout plodded along between cigarettes, and they waited for me to take the paper to Florence again. I got so sick of it, but now I was on Broadway. Bumped by enthralled female bystanders, the fellow held up his Instamatic behind me as I laughed when he lost all control, as everyone always does in New York City, and blurted it out. He must have objected to the wild opening scene of the play. “Hey! Liam! Turn around, ya bastard!” Sure enough, the 12-week run Neeson turned and started signing autographs on his side of the hive as the camera’s flash illuminated the “The Judas Kiss” billboard sign. Jailed homosexuals make life rough on an actor from Ballymena in Northern Ireland. His wife, Natasha Richardson, was in “Cabaret” until Times Square was blocked off. Some scaffolding had fallen at the Conde Nast building on West 43rd Avenue, killing a poor 73-year-old lady in the Woodstock Hotel, turning a five-block area into a sanitarium for 41,000 licensed and crazed, steering-wheel-pounding, yet affable NYC cabbies (One told me of a local TV newscaster who tipped 35 cents to him once. One told me he doesn’t pick up black passengers. One said he likes the mayor.) “It hit like a baseball bat,” a firefighter told the Daily News. Hardhat guys hollered at folks on the street to warn them. Vacation time...it felt like being baptized - the second time around during July of 1998. Journalists don’t get many vacations, but when they do, they usually pull the blinds, take the receiver off the hook and hit the liquor store - but this vacation, the first good one since I got fired at the Florence Morning News, was right on time, like AZT’s successor. It takes a few days for the serenity to sink in. The first few days feel like a regular weekend. That Hardee’s Huskee Junior seems a million miles away when you realize there are 17,000 eating establishments to choose from. The average dinner cost $29.28 in 1996, according to a Zagat survey, including drink, tax and tip. As Beach Boy Brian Wilson squinted reading his cue cards, David Letterman sat in the darkness of The Ed Sullivan Theatre as the ghost of John Lennon infested the bank of TV monitors July 22 while guest Tony Danza scooted to his play across town and a man danced in his drawers. One night late in December or so I had applied for the tickets, and once folks knew I had scored them, the calls started coming in to borrow them, but I held on to them tighter than I held on to my puberty. You can’t give them away or sell them - it’s nontransferable, and you have to be over 16, unless you’re a guest here at 1697 Broadway between 53rd St. and 54th St. I was only about six when The Beatles played here. A man buffs the shiny black floor as a comedian prepared to warm up the crowd. Letterman even came out and test-drove a few jokes. Wilson sounded great but looked rough. Times Square is cleaner. Hobos are harder to find. Bathrooms are scarcer than D.A.R. members at a Marilyn Manson concert, and restrooms, nine out of 10, are still extremely rancid. One remembers the recent N.Y. Times quote by Myrtle Beach Mark McBride which ridiculed big city life. Here’s a Top 10 List: “My Top 10 Reasons to Visit New York” 1. To lift the 450,000-pound Statue of Liberty. 2. To learn there are 55,224 tennis balls used in the U.S. Open. 3. To mingle with 1.9 million commuters instead of the several thousand daily from Conway, S.C. to Myrtle Beach, S.C. 4. To peruse the 200,000 baseball cards in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I scooped up some discounted Christmas cards in the gift shop and a Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) print “Flowering Garden.” 5. To swim around Manhattan (it actually takes seven hours, 15 minutes.) 6. To learn there are 500 oz. of fragrance sprayed at Bloomingdale’s daily. 7. To see 200 skyscrapers. 8. To watch the mayor try to outlaw nude dancing. 9. To find out more about organized crime, the Mafia and wiseguys who make Joe Pesci look like a Hollywood fruitcake. 10. To eat a hot dog with that pink sauce. Granite versus green pasture - free drinks at night in the student center and Internet access in the new library - I was able to stay free at Fordham University where my wife was attending a conference. Outside the boundary of the fence, however, was a bustling Bronx. Our first encounter after hitting the streets after a van ride from JFK was a loud “CRASH!” A hit-and-run cemented in my mind a fact that I already knew. New Yorkers are, at heart, very humane. A bystander saw the old model vehicle sideswipe a car stopped at the stoplight near the train station, but none of us bozos had the nerve to run up to the dazed driver, rip out a piece of paper from a notebook and hand him the scribbled license number of the perp who had sped around the corner, accelerating as blue smoke coughed out of the exhaust pipe. Six-dollar lasagna at the corner restaurant and a nap hit the spot after hitting our dorm room. Monday, July 20: it was on to Simon & Schuster for me as I took my book manuscript to an editor who had responded favorably after a query but weeks later returned it, saying it had “tension” and “energy” but was not for their current list. This was the morning the scaffolding fell. I dropped it off at 9:30 a.m. and had plenty of time to taxi over to Macys to snarf my free press souvenir knapsack. The cabs were clean and looked brand spanking new. My hailing method was comical; it was a dramatic impersonation of a schoolteacher scolding a misbehaving pupil with the index finger slicing the air in a short, abbreviated puncture. As New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani finished his policy speech July 20 in the plush executive dining room of The Republic National Bank, his sweeping epistle on eliminating welfare by 2000 and claiming credit for reduced unemployment, The New York Times had already picked a headline. “Mayor Wants To Abolish Use of Methadone” read the next morning’s headline, “Drug Treatment Experts Angered by 4-Year Aim.” Here in Horry County, S.C. the community of Socastee had it easy fighting a methadone clinic. “City Hall Calls War on Narcotics Ineffective,” read the subhead. Writer Christopher S. Wren had apparently seized the opportunity to play up the mayor’s call to cease the methadone programs as Clinton drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey was quoted to underline research that methadone is effective. “I’ll have a seltzer,” I told the well-dressed soda jerk. There were Coca-Colas, ice and glasses. A bank of TV cameras was ready to record the speech. With crime falling 48 percent, murder by 70 percent, Giuliani discussed the WPA and welfare’s misuse. “While the supposedly ‘progressive’ philosophy went unchallenged in New York City for decades, New York City became the welfare capital of the world,” he said, using graphs. Since March 1995 Giuliani said welfare rolls have been cut by more than 400,000, and in February they were below 800,000 for the first time since 1967. “We will end welfare by the dawn of the new century,” he promised, complimenting job centers and suggesting mandatory drug tests for new clients. I accidentally broke protocol as I stood to leave as the mayor was making his exit, which is apparently totally inappropriate. He was followed by many bodyguards, but I was approaching my 2 p.m. appointment at Tribeca Grill, Robert DeNiro’s restaurant at 275 Greenwich St. Splurging was necessary after dropping off a manuscript, so I looked at the menu for Monday, July 20, 1998 which featured the daily soup, gazpacho with roasted corn and crabmeat Salsa and the Chef’s Special - pan-seared sea bass with lentil salad, mache and pumpkin seed vinaigrette, raspberry financier with cinnamon ice cream and a recommended wine of Bacchus Chardonnay 1996 California. It was onward bound for me and six Budweisers and a shot of Jim Beam. The blatant absence of prices on the menu signaled to me that my order of a “Tribeca Burger” with homemade potato roll, creamy vegetable slaw and French fries, was going to cost. My next trip will be showered with mucho dinero so I can try the Arugla Salad with bocconcini and basil oil, warm goat cheese strudel with watercress salad and beet vinaigrette, the terrine of duck and foie gras with grilled brioche toast and spice-rubbed yellowfin tuna with cucumber and seaweed salad. Maybe I’ll nibble on the creme brulee, strawberry rhubarb tart or sorbets. The chef was Don Pintabona with Tomas Paulino as pastry chef. Splurge #1 was a Tribeca Grill lighter; #2 was a T-shirt. They have denim shirts, pins, hats and jackets. Call 212-941-3900 for reservations. The N.Y. Convention Visitors Bureau is bad to the bone. “The Big Apple” publicity began in 1971, launched by Charles Gillett, past bureau president. The term began in the 1920s and 30s with celebs. Myrtle Beach could use a zoo like the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo, open year- round with 5,000 animals, 607 species since 1899 on 265 acres with two million annual attendance. Admission is free Wednesdays for the largest urban wildlife conservation facility in America. The Bengali Monorail is relaxing. Where else can you find a sambar, barasingha or babirusa? The wildest part of the Bronx Zoo, founded in 1895 by the New York Zoological Society, turned out to be when children wanting a ride attacked our tour-guided golf cart. The most captivating part of the tour was when the totally green forest vanished as you could spot a fence, one the other side of which was a city tenement building. Official All-Star Cafe in Times Square was a welcome stop as snarled traffic irked the calmest of honking cab drivers. I already had a complimentary meal set from the Download 2.99 Mb. Share with your friends:
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