Justice is Served?

The internet was really starting to pick up, to the point where ordinary Joes had America Online and private e-mail and could use Netscape to 'surf the web' and find things. The thought occurred to me: maybe Bo Gibson was no longer so untraceable. But searches for Bo Gibson, or his real name, Beauregard, still turned up nothing. By now, he'd be 52 years old.

Well, if the internet didn't turn up anything on him, maybe it would at least make things easier in communicating with the Treasury Department as to whether or not he was paying taxes again. You only have to work for 40 quarters to be eligible for Social Security retirement, and Gibson already had that in when he disappeared off the map in 1985. Oh, his pension wouldn't be much, but he'd probably take it anyway. Then, when he turned 65, he'd be eligible for Medicare. Thing is, that wouldn't happen until 2012.

That was when I had an epiphany: he wouldn't be eligible for Social Security or Medicare for a while yet, but he was a veteran, and I knew that he had diabetes. Maybe he'd been getting health care through the VA!

My warrants to look for his tax records failed me again; he was still off the grid. I did get one clue, however: he'd been treated at the VA Hospital in Cincinnati just two years ago.

Fortunately, there's no statute of limitations on murder, so I was able to get the additional warrants I needed. They were limited: his actual medical records were off limits, but at least I was able to get an address: 1948 Gibson Street in Florence, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

Yeah, right: there was no such address, and 1948 was when Gibson was born; he'd just made it the fuck up! The trail went cold again. I basically said, fuck it, I was just wasting my time. I'd check again in 2012, after he turned 65, when there ought to be Medicare and Social Security info on him.

This fucker was going to escape justice after all!

oo0oo

August 12, 2014:

"What do you mean, Beau, that things just couldn't keep going on like they were?"

"Well, see, a man can let his wife get what she needs, and hope that she's at least grateful and respectful, but the time came when that feller's wife just plain disrespected him, after all he'd done for her. He came home a bit early, an' saw the evidence. Not once before had his wife entertained her fellers at their house, but sometime she had, 'cause there was all the evidence he needed, stainin' the sheets.

"Then, when she got back, said she'd only been to the groc'ry store, an' her husband confronted her with it. An' she said, 'BFD, I needed it, you ain't doin' it, so I does what I wants to,' y'know?

"Well, what can a man do, in the face of that kind of disrespect?"

oo0oo

August 1, 2014:

2012 came and went, and I'd forgotten about the Gibson case. Hell, it was 2014 now, and the file on the Trainor murder had been open for 32 years now, while Shea Gibson was 39 years in her grave. No solutions, and no one cared.

I thought back to Sandy Trainor, who'd been splattered with her husband's blood and brains that Thanksgiving, long ago. It had taken a while for me to figure out that yeah, he's been screwing around on her, though I never had actual proof, but she had denied that her husband had given her even the slightest clue that he'd been messing around, stuff Finnegan had to investigate when the case was fresh. But nothing, not affairs, nor any bad financial dealings, had gone anywhere.

I thought back to the movie The Incredible Hulk, where Bruce Banner had completely dropped out of sight for five years. No credit cards, no cell phones, nothing that could be used to track him. Banner had been working in a soda bottling plant somewhere in Brazil, but I guessed that Bo Gibson was still in the US, just deeply hidden.

And there it was, bingo! He had filed for his meager Social Security benefits, and they had to go somewhere. His check was being directly deposited in an account in Citizens Bank & Trust Company, in Jackson, Kentucky! Thanks to the banking regulations passed after the September 11th attacks, that meant he'd needed a valid, current photo ID and a real physical address to open that account.

oo0oo

I'll never forget that day, Tuesday, August 12, 2014. I'd had to fly into Lexington, and then rented a car to make it to Jackson, eighty miles away, some of it on winding country roads. The bank president, a nice enough fellow, didn't seem particularly happy when I presented my warrant to look at Gibson's bank records. In fact, he called the county sheriff, since my warrant had been issued in federal court in Massachusetts, but, in the end, the validity of my warrant was recognized. It turned out that Gibson didn't run very much through that account, his Social Security check only, and he always took it all out, in cash, at the branch bank in Beattyville. There was a post office box listed as a mailing address, again in Beattyville, but the required physical address, 1948 Gibson Street, was phony, which I knew the second I saw it.

Gibson's Social Security check arrived on the first Wednesday of the month, so he'd already cashed it out for August. Lee County, where Beattyville sits, isn't very large, but it was all hills and hollows - hollers, they call them in this weird Kentucky twang - and someone who didn't know his way around might never be able to find a man who didn't want to be found there. I remembered the case of Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta bomber, who hid out for five years in the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. Even though the Feds had hundreds of men trying to find him, and knew in what general area to look, his woodcraft kept him from capture until 2003, when he was caught dumpster diving for food.

There was just one of me, and I sure didn't know my way around the backwoods of eastern Kentucky. Still, maybe Gibson wouldn't be too hard to find: he obviously came to town to cash his check, and almost certainly bought groceries and other stuff in town.

My obvious stop: the Lee County sheriff's office. I didn't have a warrant for Gibson's arrest; all that I needed to do, at least for now, was talk to him. Since I wasn't there to arrest him - depending, of course, on what he told me - the sheriff didn't see any reason not to tell me where he lived. I guess that the sheriff made it his business to know everybody in the county, and said not to worry about talking to "that old man."

"I guess you're that sheriff that's been lookin' for me for all these years." Gibson didn't seem the least bit startled to see me when I walked up what passed for a driveway to his property. The sheriff had told me that it was almost a half mile long, but there was no way on God's earth that the sedan I had rented was going to make it up that driveway. It was steep as shit, half dirt and half gravel, and rutted as though water ran off the mountain right down that driveway. It was nice and sunny today, but it had obviously rained some within the past couple of days.

"Not a sheriff, Mr Gibson," I replied, "but yes, I'm a detective, from Boston. Can I talk to you for a while?"

oo0oo

So, now I had the story. Beau Gibson hadn't actually admitted anything yet, and while I knew what he'd done, it was still a circumstantial case without a real confession.

"Well, Beau," I asked him, "this fellow you were talking about, did he ever tell you what he did with the weapons he used?"

"Supposedly now, this feller, he knew firearms, ya see, an' he knew how to disassemble 'em. He could have taken all of the steel parts of that rifle, and tied them inta the rebar of a footin' somewhere, where they'd get covered up with concrete, an' never ever be found. The wood parts, those could jus' be burned up. I mean, leastways if'n the cops didn't suspect him first thing, an' he had the time to do it. A han'gun, now that'd be easier to hide, an' maybe ever recover after no one was watchin' him."

There! I had it! Shea Gibson was shot with a Model 1911 Colt .45 automatic, one of the finest weapons ever manufactured. Gibson just told me, in his roundabout way, that he'd recovered that weapon, and probably still had it. All that I had to do was search his cabin, secure it, and ballistics could tie it to his wife's murder.

But, as I sat there, on that porch, looking at this elderly man, who'd lived a hard life, who'd cut himself off from most of the modern world, living in a seen-better-days cabin off the grid in the hollows of eastern Kentucky, I had to wonder: did I really need to bring in this man? What good would jailing a 65 year old man for a killing 29 years ago really do?

And I thought about what his life had been like. Diabetes robbed him of his sex life, at a young age, and he'd been tolerant enough to let his wife get what she needed on the side, without complaint, silently ignoring something that would have driven a lot of men to rage and divorce. He'd only lost it when people threw their disrespect into his face, first Mel Trainor, and then his wife. Maybe justice really was served, on the people who most deserved justice.

For me, Beauregard Gibson died that day, and that was how I was going to report it; this case was closed. I'd seen his gravesite, just barely marked, in an old cemetery in Lee County, Kentucky.

And maybe that was true enough, in its own way; his spirit, his soul, had been killed back in Boston, slain by his own wife. Oh, he surely bore responsibility for that as much as she did, but, trying to put myself in his place, would I have been as tolerant as he had been, for as long as he had? What options had he had? Had he up and divorced his wife when she had that first affair, he'd have lived the rest of his life alone, never having another woman, another wife, as a cruel disease had sapped his manhood.

The spirit of Beau Gibson lives on, living the life he has made for himself, in an Appalachian hollow in one of the poorest places in the country. He'd gotten along by working as a handyman, for cash, avoiding taxes and avoiding the law for much of his life, living his life in a way that people today can hardly imagine. He's honest, in his own way, and isn't hurting anyone.

I felt good closing this case, because, in a very real sense, justice had been done.

*********************

End note: the Cajun accent was done by JimBob44, the Sheriff of St Elizabeth's Parish in Louisiana. The Kentucky drawl that Beau Gibson had picked up, having left DeGarde so long ago, was by me.

DeGarde and St Elizabeth's Parish are fictional places, the product of JimBob's imagination; Beattyville, Lee County, Jackson and Jackson County are all real places, and even the bank mentioned is a real bank. Yes, I checked: there really is no 1948 Gibson Street in Florence or Lexington or Beattyville; that's why I was able to use them as phony addresses. All of the persons named in this story are fictitious. The story, of course, is pure fiction.

Isn't it?