Thursday, Aug. 16, 2007

Piecing it together

A few lines of smeared blood were on the lining of my brother's coat when he rushed home the night of Tuesday, April 27, 1982.

Former Bonneau City Councilman James Bunch had already been stabbed to death.

"Doug, Ikey, Willie, somebody give me a pair of pants!'' Herbert "Moochie'' Bailey Jr. yelled from the shadows.

At least that's what my oldest sister, Sherry, recalled as we spoke about the incident last month for the first time.

Each of us has wildly different accounts and theories about what happened and why and how it affected us. Burying shame for a quarter of a century has a way of doing that.

April 27 was a defining night in our lives, as it was for the Bunch family, who had already coped with other tragedies.

My parents hadn't been long divorced, and my mother, Elizabeth Bailey McDaniel, was losing her job because of health problems. We were living in a green and white single-wide trailer in St. Stephen, about seven miles from the site of the murder. She had seven young kids, two grown ones, another on the way and was without insurance. Her worries over the monthly bills were mounting.

When the cops came that night - I don't remember if there were four or five or six or more police cruisers in our yard - she responded as she often did, steeling her face, complying with the officers' demands, hiding her anxiety.

"Ma'am,'' the St. Stephen police chief said, "I have a couple of questions I'd like to ask your son. Would you promise me if he comes home tonight, you would call us?''

My mother woke up several times looking for Moochie. The chief returned early the next morning. He asked to search our clothes basket. My mother said she had nothing to hide.

He didn't tell her Moochie had already been captured. Didn't tell her he was being charged with murder. Didn't tell her they had been interrogating him alone for hours. Didn't tell her my brother had given a statement in which he detailed the crime and took full responsibility even though he was with friends that night.

"Nobody told me anything,'' my mother said.

Real and imagined stories

Our family has spent the intervening 25 years not telling each other much about it either. Most of us have let our imaginations fill in the blanks.

My youngest sister, Melody, believed for all these years that the death occurred in a fight because a white man called Moochie and a friend by that unspeakable racial slur. He decided to plead guilty to the murder so as not to implicate his friend, she reasoned.

Willie believed Moochie got into a fight with his boss over a paycheck.

"They fought, and he probably stabbed him once with the possibility of someone coming in after Moochie and finishing the job'' was what Willie remembered of the circulating rumors.

"I went 25 years thinking that Moochie went to jail because he got into a fist fight and killed someone with his bare hands,'' Joseph said. "That's what all of my friends, classmates and co-workers think.''

Over the years I asked Moochie what happened and why. He refused to say. He's become a virtual stranger who, emotionally, lives in parts of Africa he's never seen.

He left behind our modest Southern, Christian upbringing for Rastafarism, which is based on biblical Scripture. He believes the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I, was the 20th century manifestation of God. Bob Marley, dreadlocks and ganja (marijuana) are the most recognizable symbols of the movement, which stresses the belief that Africa is the motherland.

Rastafarism gave him a sense of purpose, kept him strong and engaged - he gave us all African names and tried to remain the family protector, even from behind those cold, steel bars. I haven't had a cogent, coherent conversation with him, other than about Rastafarism, for years. I don't even know if he remembers the details of April 27, 1982.

'I'm doing this for you'

But he spoke before going to prison.

"He said he was innocent,'' my mother said. "He said, 'Mama, I'm going to tell what happened when we get to court. I didn't do it.'''

He was charged with murder and faced burglary charges. The Berkeley County solicitor was seeking the death penalty. A trial was set for Nov. 8. But after months of scheduled then canceled trial dates, my mother received an unexpected call saying Moochie planned to plead guilty to take the death penalty off the table.

They planned to move forward with the plea agreement. It didn't matter that it was short notice. My mother didn't have a car but a friend hurried her to the Berkeley County Courthouse.

She arrived in the middle of the hearing. She quietly tapped Moochie on the shoulder.

"I thought you told me you were innocent?'' she whispered.

"I'm doing this for you and the boys,'' he answered.

He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. Only 15 percent of violent offenders in South Carolina are ever paroled. Research shows that poor, black men are among the most likely to plead guilty. And those who plead guilty receive harsher penalties, primarily because a judge is sentencing a person who has confessed to a horrific crime.

"When the judge said life, I saw something go out of Moochie,'' my mother said. "A piece of him died. A piece of me died, too.''

Incomplete explanations

That's what my mother remembers. She also remembers how he was questioned for hours without a lawyer and how the chief said there were procedural irregularities and how the charges against Moochie's friend were dropped and how the local dignitaries she considered friends declined to stand in as character witnesses for a boy who grew up with their children.

She recently learned that two other friends were possibly on the scene that night but Moochie told them to run. That's why she doubts one man could have done so much damage without help.

Doug remembers the family gathering in the jail after Moochie agreed to the plea deal.

"He told us he tried to rob him, got into a tussle and stabbed the man over and over and over again,'' Doug said. "I remember him saying 41 times.''

Moochie later recanted and blamed my mother for his predicament, for not hiring the right lawyer, for not leaving my abusive father soon enough.

"Moochie wasn't violent,'' Doug said. "I know that is weird to say. I don't think he was lucid when he did these things. Some drugs affect you in strange ways.''

Moochie smoked marijuana, and we found a plastic bag of colorful pills in his belongings.

"Mom and Dad went through some things that he may have witnessed when he was young, but I'm telling you, Moochie was a well-adjusted, well-loved, personable, smart person,'' Doug said. "He did a lot of bad things, but he always looked out for his family.''

The official record of what happened has been destroyed or lost. The autopsy, the collected blood and fingerprints, the taped interviews - if there were any - statements from Moochie's 17-year-old friend, who was initially charged as an accessory, everything is gone.

The Berkeley County Sheriff's Department destroys most files more than 10 years old, said Capt. Rick Ollic of the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office. Assistant Berkeley County Solicitor Blair Jennings said the case file couldn't be found in the county's archives.

Even in the era of the Innocence Project, there is not a state law that mandates murder or rape records be kept. Some are. Some aren't. It depends on how meticulous each of the state's solicitors are about being organized.

A copy of Moochie's unsigned statement from the night of interrogations is on microfilm in the Clerk of Court's office. It read, in part:

"The way it happened is this. This was the second time that I had seen Mr. Bunch since Saturday. I had robbed him of [$260]. I went to his house and tried to get him to make a deal. He refused the deal. The thought then came to mind to kidnap him. At that point in time, a struggle ensued.

"Mr. Bunch refused to be kidnapped. Due to the struggle, I pulled out my knife [brown in color] from my pocket and stabbed Mr. Bunch about the face several times. Mr. Bunch then ran out of the house staggering.''

The secrecy with which the officers went about their business, as well as the last-minute, unexpected plea agreement, has fueled my mother's doubts for the past 25 years. She wants to know why Moochie's statement wasn't signed and why it was made in the dead of night.

Nothing about this has ever made sense to her or the rest of my family.

I found out recently why it has never made sense to the Bunch family either.