Sheriff

Harry Spiller

Description

This 160 page book serves as a memoir of a lawman (Harry Spiller) from Williamson County, Illinois and tells of his stories and ventures as a sheriff.

Sujets

• Droit privé
• Droit privé
• Droit privé
• Droit privé
• Criminal Law
• Droit et juridique
• Williamson County
• Law
• Illinois
• Droit pénal
• droit pénal
• Droit pénal
• Droit pénal
• Droit pénal

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 15 juin 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781681623573
• Langue: English

Extrait

T URNER P UBLISHING C OMPANY 412 Broadway P.O. Box 3101 Paducah, Kentucky 42002-3101 [phone]
Copyright 1999 Harry Spiller Publishing Rights: Turner Publishing Company This book or any part thereof may not be reproduced without the written consent of the author and the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 99-65354 ISBN: 1-56311-507-7 Turner Publishing Company Staff: Herb C. Banks II, Editor Shelley R. Davidson, Designer
Printed in the United States of America. Additional copies may be purchased directly from the publisher. Limited Edition.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Williamson County Map
Introduction
Chapter One- Call To Duty
Chapter Two- Old Blue
Chapter Three- Routine Patrol
Chapter Four- Murder In A Neighboring County
Chapter Five- Cops Are People Too
Chapter Six-A Case of Murder and Kidnapping
Chapter Seven- The Jail Break
Chapter Eight- A New Job
Chapter Nine- The Abductions
Chapter Ten- The Campaign
Chapter Eleven- The First Days In Office
Chapter Twelve- A Day In The Office With The Sheriff
Chapter Thirteen- A Change Of Guard
Chapter Fourteen- The Psychic
Chapter Fifteen- A Serial Murder Caught At Last
Chapter Sixteen- The Exhumed Body and Other Murders
Chapter Seventeen- Jail
Chapter Eighteen- President s Visit
Chapter Nineteen- Resigning
Epilogue

AUTHOR S NOTE
For protection of privacy for those names not of public record an asterisk will appear with the first use of a pseudonym in the book. All other names are real.
DEDICATION
To the finest law enforcement officer that I have had the pleasure of knowing.

Sgt. Robert M. Bob McCluskey 1952 -1997
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their assistance, I wish to thank Steve Wilson, the Marion Police department, Carbondale Police department, Carterville Police department and the county clerk s office in Williamson and Jackson Counties.
INTRODUCTION
I first became a lawman in Williamson County, Illinois, in February 1974 when Sheriff Russell Oxford hired me as a radio dispatcher for the Sheriff s Department. From that time until March 1979 I worked as a radio dispatcher, deputy sheriff, and chief deputy in the department. In March of 1979 I had the opportunity to take a job with the John A. Logan College Security department working the midnight shift, which enabled me to continue a long interrupted pursuit of a college degree. I worked at the college from 1979 until November 1982 and in that time completed a B.A. in political science, a B.S. in administration of justice, and a masters degree in public affairs. I also made the decision to run for sheriff and campaigned in 1981 and 1982.
On November 2, 1982, I was elected as the forty-second Sheriff of Williamson County, Illinois. I served as sheriff for 6 years, 8 months, and 22 days before I resigned from the office to take a job as a professor in criminal justice at John A. Logan College. I suppose I can claim to have made two marks in the history of Williamson County law enforcement-the first being that I am the only forty-second sheriff and the second being that I am the only sheriff in the county s history to resign. Not much of a mark in history
Williamson County, established on February 28, 1839, is located in the middle of southern Illinois, some fifty miles straight north of Cairo, Illinois, and centered between the Ohio and Mississippi. The county is a rectangle measuring 24 miles from east to west and 18 miles from north to south and containing 432 square miles or 267,480 acres. It is bounded on the north by Franklin County, on the south by Johnson County, on the east by Saline County and on the west by Jackson County.
Williamson County has a history of violence that reaches back to Independence Day 1868, when members of a couple of families engaged in a card game that ended in a brawl. Later several prominent families came into conflict over a few bushels of oats, and the dispute resulted in a lawsuit. These incidents caused a blood feud between the Bulliners and Crains against the Sisneys and Hendersons that went on for about eight years, festering into what would be known as the Bloody Vendetta.
At the same time Williamson County was infested with the Ku Klux Klan, which was established, according to the members, to clean up improper behavior. Locally, the Klan sought mainly to rid the county of liquor and, of course, minorities. Its activities ended in much bloodshed.
On June 22, 1922, the violence in the county reached a new level when 2,000 union miners and their sympathizers clashed with some 50 strikebreakers working a strip mine southeast of Herrin. The confrontation ended with 30 men massacred by the union workers, bringing of a half century of violent incidents to a bloody climax. The county acquired a new name-Bloody Williamson.
When I was elected sheriff, 60 years had passed since the Herrin Massacre. It and other events had been recorded and locked into their place in history books such as Bloody Williamson, The Herrin Massacre,and Charlie Burger. But those of my generation who were raised in Williamson County dealt with a mixed bag of feelings about violence. From the time I was in kindergarten until I graduated from high school, I walked to the Marion schools almost every day just as many other kids growing up in this area did. We never worried about murder or other crime. It was seldom that our doors were locked or that we or our parents were concerned about crime. It was all in the history books or it happened some place else, not here
For 16 years I worked as a deputy sheriff, investigator, and sheriff in a place where murder and other crime isn t supposed to happen. Investigating murder cases and other crimes mainly in Williamson County, but assisting in other counties, too, I learned the unpleasant reality: murder and crime are all around us. They come swiftly to their victims, and these victims can be anyone-the rich, the poor, the old and the young. It can happen anywhere day or night. It doesn t matter if we live in an area with brick-front towns, small farms, white church houses, lakes and ponds, the Shawnee National Forest, and the muddy rivers, because all too often victims fall prey in places that we think are safe to live healthy lives and raise our children-places where we take walks on hot summer nights, where our children play in the park without concern, where we fish in the local pond to land the big one, and where we leave our doors unlocked at night.
But there is one other unfortunate reality that remains in the community as this bizarre and unpredictable human behavior increases in rural America: the refusal of the people to believe that these incidents are anything but isolated incidents, coupled with the belief that the real problems of crime and murder are still confined to large cities of America.
Williamson County s crime rate is in the upper third of the 102 counties in the state of Illinois. We have a unique history of violence for a rural county, but our day-to-day lives are typical of most other rural counties in America. There have been many changes in this county since those days of the Bloody Vendettas, and much of that change began in the 1960s. The turbulence of the 1960s-the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, increased drug problems, free love, and increased crime-sparked President Nixon to appoint a commission to study the crime problem in America. The main focus of the study was the criminal justice system. The study revealed that police agencies throughout the country were understaffed, poorly trained, and lacked adequate equipment to fulfill law enforcement functions. Further, it found that many agencies used patronage hiring practices with political corruption all-to-often present. As a result, the Ombinus Safe Streets Act of 1968 was passed and by the mid-1970s law enforcement agencies throughout the country were receiving federal revenue Sharing Funds to upgrade local law enforcement. In addition, many laws were changed to require more training.
By the mid-1980s personnel in local police departments of southern Illinois had changed from good-old-boys to professionals. I lived and worked as a lawman during many of those changes, and eventually I felt compelled to share them with those who are interested. The information for this book came from my personal diary, interviews with police, official police records, court records from Williamson and Jackson Counties, newspaper articles, and county records. The dialogue used in this book in experiences on patrol is not exact, as I did not record conversations word for word in my diary, but I am confident that it is very close in both tone and content. The dialogue in the murder cases is exact, as it is taken from the official court and police records. This book is a first person account of the changes from 1974 through 1989 as I saw them, both as a deputy sheriff and as sheriff in Williamson County. Running the gamut from real slices of life, murder, drugs, domestic problems, overcrowded jails, political corruption, and personnel problems to outright humor, this memoir reflects changes and experiences common to local police departments throughout rural America.
CHAPTER 1 A C ALL T O D UTY
All I wanted was a job. I had just finished ten year s service in the Marine Corps in June 1973. All summer I had worked as a laborer in construction while I applied for every local, state, and federal cop job in the area. It was now the fall of 1973 and I had just received a letter to report for testing for a county deputy sheriff s job. I was excited.
A few days later I took a written exam for the job. The exam had two parts. The first was an intelligence test, I guess. It had a lot of algebra questions on it, which was puzzling to me because I never could figure out what the relationship was between algebra and police work.
The second part of the test made a little more sense. It was a psychological exam with a lot of questions-Do you love your