Читать книгу Killer Women - Devasting True Stories of Female Murderers - Wensley Clarkson - Страница 5

St Jacob is the sort of place where nothing much happens. A sleepy little hamlet set in the middle of the Illinois flatlands, which many people describe as the heart of America. The population of this tiny community is just eight-hundred and the locals have always said that they dread the day it tops the thousand mark.

As you drive into St Jacob you cannot help noticing the fertile fields that surround it on all four sides. Beautiful green pastures expertly farmed for maximum potential. They represent the real reason why the village even exists. The farming of land is the reason most of the population live and breed there – and that’s the way they all want to keep it.

There are only half-a-dozen streets in St Jacob and they are never exactly bristling with traffic. There only ever seem to be a handful of pick-up trucks and the occasional car – and everyone knows the owner of each vehicle.

Perhaps not surprisingly, property prices in St Jacob have never been high. You could pick up a perfectly reasonable detached home on the edge of town for £30,000 – hardly a king’s ransom by anyone’s standards.

That was how Kathy Gaultney and her husband Keith came to settle in the town in the early 1980s. They had lived in larger communities nearby over the years, but both of them fell in love with the peace and quiet of St Jacob – and houses went for a price even they could afford.

The problem was that neither Keith nor Kathy were working full time. He organised building site labour for construction sites all over the state of Illinois. But sometimes that could mean months of solid work followed by weeks of inactivity. Kathy – who had just given birth to their son Walter – was not working at all. You could say the Gaultneys were struggling to survive. But at least they had their pretty little white wooden – slatted cottage in St Jacob – even though the modest mortgage repayments were proving very difficult to keep up.

It was fairly inevitable that Kathy had to get a job. She knew Keith was expecting it – and as their struggle to stay financially afloat continued, she came to the conclusion that any type of work would do. Within a few months of Walter’s birth, Kathy Gaultney found herself working behind the bar at a rough and ready hostelry in nearby Collinsville. It wasn’t exactly a well-paid position but it would keep the wolf from the door for the time being.

Back at home, Keith’s work had completely dried up and he had taken to boozing excessively. There was a certain irony in the fact that Kathy’s income came from serving alcohol and Keith was wasting all her hard-earned cash on the very same stuff. She was working all hours God could send while he knocked back countless bottles of rye at their pretty little home. Often she would arrive back late at night, completely shattered, only to find him slumped on their bed in a stupor.

At first, Kathy decided to bite her lip and say nothing to her husband. After all, he had been the breadwinner for many years before it had all turned sour. Things would pick up and he would sort himself out, she kept telling herself. The truth was that Keith Gaultney had long since given up the fight. His pride had taken a huge knock and now he was sinking rapidly into alcoholic oblivion. He did not really care any more. Just so long as Kathy kept working they could just about survive – and that would do him just fine.

When Kathy Gaultney met Mary O’Guinn one night as she was serving beers behind the bar of the hostelry, she was at an all-time low. The mortgage had not been paid for three months. She could barely afford to clothe their baby son and 11-year-old daughter Rachel from an earlier marriage. Times were pretty desperate and she was not bashful about admitting it to anyone who would listen. It was a plea for help. Kathy knew full well that time was running out unless she could find some other, more profitable way of earning a living.

Mary O’Guinn appeared like some angel of mercy – the answer to those desperate dreams. The attractive redheaded housewife was fully aware of how vulnerable Kathy was and she made her an offer she could not really refuse. On the surface it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime.

Within a few weeks of that first meeting, Kathy and her equally stretched pal Martha Young were the proud owners of the New Way Toning Salon for housewives, in Collinsville. No one questioned the women’s sudden ability to pay tens of thousands of dollars in cash for the premises needed to house the club. But then only Kathy, Martha and their new best friend Mary O’Guinn were aware of the secret office hidden behind the gym.

In it was an assortment of weighing machines – but these had nothing whatsoever to do with keeping people fit. They were small scales which were perfect for weighing drugs before distributing them to a network of suppliers throughout the American mid-West. Kathy Gaultney had just become a full-time employee of one of the country’s biggest drug cartels.

For the first few months, life at the New Way Toning Salon was very very good for Kathy and her pal Martha Young. The two women really looked and acted the part of bosses of a health club. Both of them looked like ordinary suburban housewives. Kathy, with her glasses and neat, short hairstyle, always dressed in a tracksuit and sneakers. She could have been any one of a million hardworking women in a middle-class enclave anywhere in the Western World.

And, perhaps surprisingly, the legitimate business was actually doing quite well. They had worked very hard to build it up. They had something to prove to Mary O’Guinn. For both Kathy and Martha rather looked down on the drug dealing that was going on in their backroom. But they also knew that without the narcotics gang behind their little venture it would have been nothing more than a fantasy for the rest of their lives.

Kathy tried hard not to consider the consequences of all those millions of dollars’ worth of cannabis that were weighed, re-weighed and then packaged up for distribution among the street dealers of Illinois. She turned a blind eye when heavy-set characters used to turn up with vans for delivery and collection at all times of the day and night. Kathy was just delighted that for the first time in her adult life she had enough money to pay the mortgage, feed and clothe her children and enjoy some of the better things in life.

When Mary O’Guinn and her brother Roy Vernon Dean asked her if she would begin delivering some of the cannabis herself, she agreed because they were offering her more money to do it. And, with the drunken Keith now hitting rock bottom back at home in nearby St Jacob, it seemed to make a lot of sense. Kathy was actually starting to enjoy life again. There was something quite exciting about taking risks. There was also something very fulfilling about being able to spend all the money you wanted. Becoming a drug courier wasn’t so bad after all.

Even when Kathy Gaultney found herself driving hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of cannabis plus $45,000 in cash in the boot of her car, it did not worry her. Who would bother stopping and searching a housewife from St Jacob? She hardly looked the part of a hardened drug smuggler involved in one of the biggest cannabis supply networks in American criminal history.

As she parked her car outside her cosy little cottage in that tiny rural community, she did not even bother to take her valuable booty inside the house. It was better if she kept it out of the way of her kids and husband Keith. He was always ranting in redneck fashion about how awful drugs were. He even warned her daughter to be careful.

‘There’s a lot of evil people out there who’ll try and force you to take drugs. Just tell ’em no way.’

Keith Gaultney could hardly talk. He could not even come to terms with his own addiction – to alcohol. Yet somehow – in his mind at least – the damage he was inflicting on his own liver was not as morally wrong as smoking pot. Sometimes Kathy Gaultney felt like telling him that pot was probably less harmful that booze, but she never bothered. He would not have appreciated her opinions. As far as Keith Gaultney was concerned, women were to be seen and not heard.

‘Kathy. What the hell have you got in the trunk, woman?’

Keith Gaultney was sober for once. But then it was seven in the morning when he went outside to get a jack from his wife’s car and discovered a small fortune in drugs stashed in the boot.

Kathy Gaultney did not reply at first. She needed a moment to think about this. She was in a classic dilemma – did she admit to Keith that they were drugs; or should she try and deny they even belonged to her?

But it did not take her long to realise there was no point in hiding the obvious. Kathy pulled her husband down on the bed beside her and started to tell him the truth. But being honest is not always the best answer when it comes to marriage. Keith Gaultney was spitting mad. In any case, for once in his life, he had something on her. All his years of heavy drinking had put him in a vulnerable position as far as their relationship was concerned. Now, for the first time, he had the upper hand and he was determined to milk it for all it was worth.

‘Drugs? What the hell are you doin’ selling drugs?’

But then Kathy had the perfect excuse.

‘How else were we goin’ to pay the mortgage, the bills, the kids’ clothes?’

Keith Gaultney did not like facing the realities of the situation. He hated the fact that he had not been the main breadwinner in the family for a long, long time. Kathy was making him face facts – and it hurt.

‘But we could have survived some other way.’

Kathy Gaultney did not agree. It was time for some plain speaking in that household. Maybe the discovery of the drugs was a blessing in disguise. Perhaps now she could come out in the open and say what she had been thinking for years.

‘There was no other way. You’ve lived off my money for months. I haven’t noticed you complaining.’

Keith Gaultney did not reply. He understood her point but he would never accept that selling drugs was the answer. He’d never felt the urge to even try pot as a kid. Now his wife, the mother of his only son, was admitting that she was heavily involved in a vast drug ring. Keith Gaultney retreated into his own shell-like existence from that day onwards.

For months he hardly spoke to his wife and sank deeper and deeper into an alcoholic abyss. The only times he could bring himself to talk to her were when he could not stand the thought of what she was involved in. Then he would let fly with a tirade of abuse centred around the inevitable subject of drugs.

‘How can you sit there and tell me that drugs don’t harm people? How can you?’

Keith Gaultney was off again on one of his regular ranting matches with Kathy. But this time she decided to respond. She was fed up with him going on and on about drugs. It was time for some home truths.

‘Well, pot is hardly any more harmful than all that booze you drink.’

Kathy was hitting back. OK, she could not defend the use of heavier drugs, but as far as she was concerned her narcotics overlords were only dealing in cannabis. Where was the harm in that?

But her husband did not quite see it that way.

‘Drugs are drugs. One type leads to another. It’s as simple as that.’

Kathy was concerned about her husband’s attitude because he was unshakable. Nothing would convince him that pot might not be so bad. She feared that he might one day do something about her involvement with the notorious Dean family.

But it wasn’t just drugs that were tearing the Gaultney family apart. Keith’s drinking had become a morning, noon and night-time obsession. The only work left to him was the opening of bottles. His reward – consuming the contents.

By the time Kathy got home after a hard day running the beauty salon followed by hours of weighing a fortune’s worth of cannabis, she was exhausted. Yet, she would be expected to make them all dinner. Bath her son. Get both kids to bed and attend to her husband’s every whim and command. It was simply proving too much for her to handle.

Some nights she would stay on at the shop in Collinsville and have a drink with her great friend and partner Martha, because it was infinitely preferable to going home to face Keith and the kids.

But Kathy knew things could not just go on like that for ever. When she got home late yet again one night in February, 1988, Keith rounded on her and started threatening her. She decided she’d had enough.

As Keith ranted and raved about ‘those damn drug peddlers’, she packed a suitcase, grabbed both the kids and headed out the front door. A few days later, she filed for divorce. But what disturbed her the most was that each time she tried to have a sensible conversation with Keith on the phone, he would start up again about those drugs. But this time he was more adamant.

‘I reckon the authorities would like to hear all about those scumbags you work for.’

Kathy did not like the sound of what she was hearing. The ramblings of a drunken, vindictive husband were one thing. But a threat to destroy everything she had built up so carefully was another matter altogether.

She could sense from the tone of his voice that he was contemplating taking this whole business a much more dangerous stage further.

‘It’s the perfect weapon for a single lady.’

The assistant in the gun shop in Collinsville might as well have been trying to sell Kathy Gaultney a piece of jewellery. But then that’s America for you. A reasonable gun costs about the same as a nice ring. And it’s just as easy to buy!

By then Kathy was looking at purchasing a .22 ‘Saturday Night Special’. In a country where some states have more deaths from gunshot wounds than car crashes, it’s no great surprise when a woman walks into a shop wanting to buy a gun.

As she handled the snub-nosed pistol over the counter of the shop, she knew she had to buy it. The stress and strain of running a legit beauty salon and an illicit drugs factory, and contemplating a divorce from her alcoholic husband was driving her to consider desperate measures in order to maintain the happiness she so needed.

‘Do ya think it’ll make my husband stop abusing me?’

It seemed a strange question to ask a guy who was trying to sell you a gun. But Kathy wanted some reassurance.

‘I can assure you, ma’am, that no husband in his right mind will mess with one of those things.’

By the time Kathy Gaultney enrolled at a nearby shooting range for expert training on how to handle that gun, her husband’s threat to blow the whistle on her illegal activities was constantly ringing in her ears. She did not know if he would carry it through or not, but she wanted to be prepared just in case he really did. No one was going to destroy her life. She would see him go to hell rather than allow him to get away with ruining everything for her and the kids.

Back at their little house in St Jacob, Keith Gaultney was becoming a very lonely, isolated character. Kathy and the kids had moved out to live in Collinsville. He had no company. His only conversation was with a near-empty bottle. Perhaps it was not really that surprising when his addled, paranoid mind convinced him that the way to get Kathy back was to blow the whistle on those evil drug barons who had destroyed their life together.

Keith Gaultney picked up the phone and dialled the directory enquiry service.

‘Internal Revenue Service, please.’

He only meant to scare Kathy into seeing sense and coming back with the kids. The IRS would rap her on the knuckles and then go after the really big boys. Keith Gaultney did not even consider the fact that the US Drug Enforcement Agency would automatically get involved.

18 March, 1988, seemed like a pretty ordinary day at the New Way Toning Salon in Collinsville. There was a handful of women customers going through their $20-a-head skin-toning session, and no sign of the illegal activities that were a daily routine in the backroom of the premises.

Neither of the women even noticed the black van parked up across the street from the beauty salon. But they certainly realised something was wrong when six Drug Enforcement Agents rushed through the front and back exits. Kathy’s first reaction was to deny any knowledge of the drug den hidden behind the main store. Under her breath she muttered: ‘You bastard, Keith. You bastard.’

As the well-dressed officers made a clean sweep of the premises, Kathy and Martha looked on with blank expressions. But beneath their surprised faces lay a fury that was virtually uncontrollable. Kathy looked over at her friend and said:

‘That shit. I could kill him.’

By the time the agents had taken away various bits and pieces of evidence of the drug packaging that was taking place behind the salon, Kathy was steaming mad. She had to get even – somehow.

‘I know you did it, Keith. I just know.’

Keith Gaultney hardly even bothered to deny it either.

As his wife tried to extract a confession from him that he had sparked the DEA raid that morning, he just let it all hang in the air. But his refusal to admit it just helped convince Kathy that there had to be a way to stop him before he destroyed everything she had built up so carefully.

Her drug bosses were not that worried by the raid because the agents could not find any actual narcotics. They decided that Kathy and Martha would have to continue dealing from their cars or homes rather than using the backroom of the salon. The two women really had little choice in the matter as they both desperately needed the money to survive. There was no turning back.

But there was a very real danger that Keith Gaultney would stir up even more trouble for his wife, especially since the whole of St Jacob now knew from local newspaper reports of the raid that his wife was a suspected drug peddler.

All it needed was another call from him to the IRS and then Kathy’s world would well and truly come tumbling down like a pack of cards. But Keith Gaultney was satisfied for the moment. He genuinely hoped that his wife would stop her involvement in drugs after the raid on the salon. But Kathy was in way too deep.

And she had already devised a plan to keep a much closer eye on her informant husband.

Keith Gaultney was delighted when Kathy announced she was moving back in and putting the divorce plans on ice. He actually believed that her decision was evidence in itself that he had done the right thing by informing on her to the authorities.

For the first few months after she reappeared, he even tried to slow down his drinking so they could resume a normal family life together with the kids. They actually seemed to start enjoying each other’s company again.

Kathy wondered whether she had been wrong to condemn Keith in the first place. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

But soon his own self-doubt began to return and the booze battled its way back into a dominant position in his life once more. Many believe it was brought on by the reality of the situation that Keith found himself facing – his wife was even more heavily involved with the Roy Vernon Dean drug cartel than before. Now she was delivering vast quantities of cannabis around the county. If anything, she was in much more deeply than before.

‘I told you to stop dealing drugs, Kathy. I won’t have it.’

Kathy Gaultney tried to humour her husband by promising that she was not involved any more. But he knew she was. Mind you, it was the only way they could scrape together enough money to survive.

‘Drugs are going to be the death of us, Kathy. You mark my words.’

Keith Gaultney had a habit of putting his foot in his mouth. But this time he was putting ideas into his wife’s head. She looked over at him, droning on and on through the alcohol, and thought about that Saturday Night Special she purchased even before the DEA raid on the salon.

She knew she could not bear the thought of listening to his drunken accusations for much longer. Something had to be done to silence him for ever. But it wasn’t until almost a year later that Kathy Gaultney actually built up the courage to shut him up for good. They had many ‘near misses’ – with Keith threatening to go to the authorities virtually each time she came home late. But somehow he kept quiet, although the ranting was becoming less and less coded. Now he was getting pretty blunt.

‘One day, I’ll go to them and then that’ll stop that bastard Dean.’

Kathy knew all the danger signs were there. She had to do something before it was too late.

Rachel was delighted when her mom told her and a friend to ‘get lost’ for a few hours on the evening of 22 September, 1989. St Jacob was the sort of place where kids could safely play on the streets until all hours.

But there was one small problem. Neither Rachel nor her pal had any money and they wanted to go down to the late-night store and buy themselves some sodas and a packet of potato crisps.

So the two girls sat down in the empty breaker’s yard opposite their house in Second Street and waited for Kathy Gaultney and Rachel’s half-brother Walter to leave on a shopping expedition. The plan was to then slip in and steal a few dollars from Keith Gaultney’s wallet. He was always so far gone on booze by about seven that he’d have long since collapsed in bed, out to the world.

But as the two girls waited patiently for Kathy to leave the house, they could not possibly have had any idea what was happening inside.

Kathy Gaultney looked down at the snoring man who called himself her husband and sneered. As he lay there in his drunken state, she felt no qualms for what she was about to do, She had locked her son out of the bedroom and told him to wait in the hall before they went shopping. Now she had some unfinished business to attend to.

The .22 Saturday Night Special was rock steady in her hand. Just seeing him there in that comatose state convinced her that what she was about to do had to be right.

She cocked the gun, leant down silently and pressed the barrel right into the fatty folds of skin on his forehead. Still he did not stir. Even with the ultimate killing machine pointed right into his head, he could feel nothing because of all the booze he had consumed.

She prodded the barrel one last time just to see if he would notice. But there was nothing there. Perhaps if he had stirred then Kathy Gaultney might not have seen it through. But somehow she imagined he would hardly feel a thing because he was already out cold anyway.

As her finger tightened its grip on the trigger, she placed her left hand over the gun to help steady it. She did not want it rebounding back on her. All those lessons at the gun club had given her a good basic knowledge of the mechanics of guns.

Now it was time. She pressed hard and felt the gun tremble as it fired. The bullet went through his head in a split second. But he was no longer asleep. The full force of that bullet had somehow awoken him from his drunken stupor.

For a moment, Kathy was taken aback. She had not expected this by any means. With the gun still firmly in her hands she pulled back a few inches and aimed again at his head. This time it would have to work.

In those few moments between shots, her eyes explored every inch of his body, trying to establish whether his apparent consciousness was just a passing phase. But she could not take any chances. She fired again from close range. This time the bullet tore a gaping hole in the side of his head and took off on a helter skelter of a ride around the inside of his brain.

Without even a flicker of emotion, Kathy Gaultney pulled out a drawer from the chest next to the bed and dropped it on to her husband’s corpse. It seemed the perfect way to make sure it all looked like a robbery that had gone tragically wrong.

Ten minutes later she was leaving the house with her young son, completely unaware that her daughter Rachel was lying in wait across the street.

Rachel and her pal crept in the back door of the house in silence just in case they woke Keith Gaultney. The youngsters opened the door to the bedroom like two cat burglars on the prowl.

When she looked inside that bedroom where her step-father lay dead, she had no idea of the brutal killing that had just taken place. No one knows if there was even a flicker of life left in his body when she snooped around the room looking for his wallet. But one thing is sure – she took no notice of the drawer emptied over his body. It was all pretty much par for the course for the ever-drunken Keith Gaultney.

Once she found what she was looking for, Rachel left the room, completely unaware that she had been just a few feet from the body of her dead step-father.

But the timing of her secret snoop around that room was to be the crucial evidence in convicting her own mother of first-degree murder.

‘Is that the police? My husband’s been shot. You better come quickly.’

Kathy Gaultney sounded distraught to the telephone operator who took her emergency call later that evening. She told officers she had returned home from late-night shopping at a number of local supermarkets to find her husband shot dead in their bed. It seemed like a robbery that had gone terribly wrong.

As the paramedics, medical examiners and assorted police milled around the Gaultney house, one figure stepped back into the shadows and found herself examining her own conscience – Kathy’s 13-year-old daughter Rachel.

For she had witnessed her mother leave that house with her half-brother and she had seen what later transpired to be the body of her step-father. Basically, this scared young girl was withholding the key to his murder and she just did not know what to do.

While the flashing lights of the police cars disappeared into the distance some hours later, she retired in silence to her little bedroom, haunted by the role she had played in the whole tragic scenario.

It was only a few weeks later that Rachel decided to call the police and tell them what had happened that fateful night. Detectives later admitted that without her testimony it is entirely possible that Kathy Gaultney might never have been arrested.

For those first few weeks after the murder of her husband, Kathy Gaultney cut a pretty confident figure in St Jacob – still reeling from the first deliberate killing in its hundred-year history.

People may have been whispering behind her back, but Kathy did not care. She had got rid of her drunken, nagging husband and that was all that mattered in her mind.

Even when a friend advised her to contact a lawyer just in case police tried to haul her in for questioning, she was super cool about the whole business.

In fact, when she motored into nearby Edwardsville with a friend one morning, she did not feel in the least bit threatened by the vicious gossip that was sweeping the area about her involvement in Keith’s death.

As she slowed down at a crossing, she even smiled when she spotted two state police detectives and an attorney leading the investigation into her husband’s murder.

‘Aren’t you guys having a busy day?’

Kathy Gaultney really was pushing her luck. Here were the top law enforcement officers involved in her husband’s case and she was ribbing them mercilessly.

Unfortunately, what Kathy Gaultney did not realise was that the case against her was now sufficient to warrant her arrest. A few minutes later, police pulled up the van she was travelling in and arrested her for the murder of her husband.

In April 1990, Kathy Gaultney, aged 34, was sentenced to life imprisonment after being found guilty of the first-degree murder of her 35-year-old husband.

Prosecuting attorney Don Weber told the court, ‘This crime was planned, but it wasn’t planned well.’ And, describing Kathy Gaultney’s own daughter’s role in her mother’s conviction, he added: ‘In any crime, the inadvertent witness is the one thing you can’t plan for.’

Some months after her trial, Kathy Gaultney contacted authorities and agreed to provide inside information on the drug cartel she worked for with Martha Young.

Twelve people, including Mary O’Guinn and her notorious one-legged drug baron brother Roy Vernon Dean, were arrested and eventually given very lengthy sentences for their involvement in one of the biggest narcotics rings in US history.

Martha Young was also imprisoned as a result of testimony from her best friend Kathy. But, amazingly, the two women still write to each other from their respective prisons in Illinois and Gaultney says that they have remained friends despite everything.

Meanwhile Gaultney herself insists that she did not carry out the murder of her drug informant husband. She maintains that he was killed by other members of the Roy Vernon Dean gang who wanted to silence Keith Gaultney before he helped authorities close down their drug cartel.

When I interviewed her in the notorious so-called ‘women killers’ cottage in the grounds of the Dwight Correctional Center in January, 1992, she was still protesting her innocence and insisting that she would eventually succeed in overturning the jury’s verdict.

In a hushed voice, as various other inmates walked freely around the inside of the stone-built building, she told me, ‘I put up with a lot of shit from Keith but there’s no way that I killed him.’

As one woman inmate – imprisoned for life for murdering her parents – poured us each a cup of tea, Kathy went on, ‘I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life, but I ended up paying the price for working for an evil ring of drug smugglers. They killed Keith and then managed to get the police to arrest me. One day I’ll prise out the truth.’

Meanwhile, Kathy continues passing her days reading and cooking inside one of the strangest cottages that I have ever visited. It remains to be seen if her desperate attempts to appeal against her sentence will ever actually be heard.

Having spent two fascinating days inside one of the world’s most daunting prisons, I have to admit that Kathy Gaultney has a great deal of charm and intelligence. When she is eventually released, I have no doubt that she will successfully reinstate herself into society.