Sheriff Accused : Was It Tough Talk or Real Kidnap Plot?

It was just coffee shop talk, a good many people here insist. You get any 10 or 15 common folk talking about the drug dealers, you’d hear much the same. Worse, even. Who doesn’t think all drug dealers need to feel the hot end of a curling iron?

No one would really do that, of course, but even good citizens can’t help fantasizing. So how could anyone believe the sheriff truly meant to kidnap and torture that fellow from North Texas? Sure, Wesley talked about doing just that, and his words were on tape, some quite precise about the curling iron, but that simply wasn’t Wesley. Wesley was good family, common folk. He’d be scared to death to do that. He just wasn’t that courageous.

Conspiracy Charges

Others, however, see matters differently. Although no kidnaping or torture ever took place, the FBI, a grand jury and the United States attorney’s office in North Texas have concluded that Love County Sheriff Wesley Liddell Jr. indeed was serious. Federal authorities on May 18 arrested Liddell, 47, and his son-in-law, Marietta, Okla., policeman Roger Ray Hilton, 27, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap and transport in interstate commerce for the purpose of “ransom or reward or otherwise.” After several hearings and one postponement, the two law officers’ trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday in a Sherman, Tex., federal courtroom.

It is fair to say this circumstance greatly disturbs the 7,469 citizens in this rural south Oklahoma county, which hugs the Red River border with Texas some 80 miles north of Dallas. To express support and raise $24,000 in defense funds for Liddell and Hilton, they’ve held a Country-Western jamboree, an ice cream social, a $50-a-plate benefit dinner, an auction and two rallies. They’ve sold T-shirts and bumper stickers--”I Support Wesley and Roger”--and caravaned to every hearing, packing the small Sherman courtroom with emotional spectators. They’ve written angry, incredulous letters and called the news media.

‘Decent Man’

“Every day we hear how the Bush Administration is waging a war on drugs,” the Bank of Love County’s president, Ron Bond, took to observing. “They can get our sheriff on conspiracy, why can’t they get the drug dealers on conspiracy? They’re prosecuting a good, decent man and letting go the hardened drug dealers.”

The sentiments weren’t unanimous, however. Here and there, a few contrary voices were heard. What if Wesley really meant to use that curling iron, a few began wondering. How do we know that fellow across the river really was a drug dealer? Should Love County look like it was endorsing kidnap and torture?

Soon enough, folks in Love County weren’t just arguing with the federal authorities. They were arguing among themselves. A cause once considered obvious now appeared more complex.

“There are two paradoxes here,” observed Willis Choate, editor of the local Marietta Monitor and formerly mayor for 12 years. “How do you justify the money and time the feds have spent on this while they let the drugs go unbridled? On the other hand, how do you explain a strongly anti-crime community getting into a situation where it’s defending people who might have broken the law?”

To understand current events in Love County, it’s helpful to consider the region’s history. This was mainly Indian territory--Choctaws and Chickasaws--until the post office and the Santa Fe railroad arrived in 1887, followed soon after by cattlemen and cotton traders. Some of the first settlers, a few possibly chased into Oklahoma by the Texas Rangers, possessed more independence and pioneering spirit than appreciation for the finer points of the law. Bill Washington, the cattle king of Mud Creek, gave his cowboy crews bonuses for gathering unbranded cattle, and when fences came to the open range, he tended to sink his posts at will, on whatever land he desired. He printed his own paper money and minted pewter coins, as did Judge Overton (Sobe) Love, whose family the county was named after.

The cattle barons and cotton mills now are long gone, victims of the Depression and the Dust Bowl drought, but the descendants of the families who first settled here in the 1880s remain, if in a considerably less affluent state than their forebears. Some still raise cattle and farm--peanuts, mainly--but most jobs now are low-wage positions at factories such as Marietta Sportswear and the Little Brownie Cookie Shop. What has lingered longer than the prosperity is the sense of independence, and suspicion of outsiders, a category that in some quarters includes people who’ve been here 20 years or more.

Family Ties

Some dozen families account for a considerable proportion of the county’s population, and anyone with roots ends up being related to almost everyone else. Wesley Liddell Jr.’s family goes back almost 100 years, and although the sheriff is now 47, he is still called Junior by just about everyone, his identity long ago cast as son of the late Wesley Liddell Sr., Love County’s sheriff for 11 years from 1969 to 1980. “I think I’m a second cousin to Junior,” observed Ron Bond, the bank president, whose family arrived here in 1914. “Then again, I’m related to half the people this side of the interstate.”

Drugs do not provide Love County with the type of troubles seen elsewhere in the country. From time to time, authorities will discover and harvest a remote field of marijuana, or come across a hill country “pill lab” churning out a supply of uppers, but cocaine and crack--and the attendant violent crime--are not familiar elements here. All the same, Love County citizens still consider drugs a problem--”any drugs at all here means we got a problem,” they tend to explain when asked. This is particularly so when the source of the drugs is from across the river in Texas, and the buyers are the young folk of Love County.

“Everyone cares so much about drugs because it involves our kids,” said Betty Anderson, who used to own the local funeral home with her late husband. “Everyone knows each other, everyone’s related, so it’s like family when someone uses drugs or deals. There’s lots of pressure from parents to do something.”

During his successful campaign for sheriff last year, Liddell promised to address the drug problem, but he did so quietly, without florid rhetoric. That’s his way. It is noted frequently and approvingly here that Liddell is not “full of brag.” “He’s just Wesley,” people say. Before becoming sheriff, he’d worked in the oil fields and for the state road maintenance department, farming cotton on the side.

“I don’t think Junior ever envisioned being a front-page-type person,” said Jane Lake at Lake Accounting. “He’s quiet, mainly quiet. Not the sort to stand up and give a speech about how he’s going to rid the county of drugs. He’s common folk. He doesn’t try to control or force his way. He sits on the back bench at church.”

On the Evening News

Accordingly, it was with considerable shock that Love County residents watching the evening TV news on May 18 learned that Liddell and his son-in-law Hilton had been arrested by federal authorities. Shock soon gave way to outrage. Without learning any more about the case, Jane Lake soon was down at her office, drafting petitions and organizing a rally and ordering T-shirts and photocopying announcements.

“You don’t always know what your neighbors are doing, and we’re not Sunday-fried-chicken-dinner-type friends,” she explained later. “But those two guys, I’d stake everything I’ve worked for over 30 years on them. Because we know them. I know Junior’s kids. My son dates his daughter. When you have as good of kids as he does, there’s not too much bad going on in that family. Or in that mind.”

The first rally drew between 300 and 500 to the Marietta courthouse lawn, an impressive figure for a county seat whose total population doesn’t top 3,000. Blue ribbons flew from trees and a banner stretched across Main Street proclaimed a “Rally for Wesley and Roger.” One speaker, Jeff McLemore, a vice president at Firstbank, proposed that everyone demonstrate their support through an alliterative four-pronged plan that involved “prayerful support, propping up, proclaiming and providing.” Jane Lake sold some 200 T-shirts for $10 each. Alvin Baker of the Rural Electrification Administration, calling for donations, began the collection by placing his own $100 bill on the grass in front of a pavilion stage, and soon others were tossing money onto a growing pile.

At Odds With Perceptions

It was not until folks began caravaning 50 miles across the state line to the assorted hearings in Sherman that they got any sort of direct exposure to the nature of the case against Liddell and Hilton. There in the federal courtroom, a magistrate’s report, FBI affidavits, witnesses’ testimony and the grand jury indictment painted a picture decidedly at odds with perceptions in Love County.

According to the court record, the case began on April 6 when Sheriff Liddell contacted Marietta police Lt. Tom Hankins to discuss the sheriff’s idea of kidnaping one Pearl (Sonny) Cornett of North Texas, whom Liddell understood from an informant to be a key figure in Love County drug trafficking. “Although Cornett had no drug-related convictions, had never been seen by the sheriff and was apparently otherwise unknown to the sheriff,” concluded U.S. Magistrate Roger Sanders, “the sheriff apparently became fixed in his notion that capturing Cornett might somehow solve many of Love County’s law enforcement problems.”

After listening to Liddell, Hankins thought it wise to contact Tom Knowles, the local FBI agent based in Ardmore, just to the north of Love County. Knowles, skeptical because he’d worked with the sheriff and knew him to be likable and law-abiding, discouraged the police officer in his concerns.

A few days later, however, the sheriff talked again to Hankins, and according to court records, Liddell’s scheme now was becoming more focused. Specifically, he intended to take Cornett blindfolded to his son-in-law’s rural home, where they’d have an electrical outlet for the curling iron. They planned to insert the hot curling iron into Cornett’s rectum, partly to punish him for past misdeeds, partly to encourage his current cooperation.

When Hankins returned to the FBI office with a report of this second meeting, Knowles reluctantly concluded the sheriff just might be serious. He arranged to wire Hankins and tape record the Marietta lieutenant’s further conversations with Liddell and his son-in-law.

Alarmed Authorities

The resulting recordings, some seven hours in all, yielded at intermittent moments certain comments by Liddell and Hilton that unavoidably alarmed the federal authorities. There was, for example, Liddell’s thought that they ought to rob and perhaps kill the culprit, as well as kidnap him and make use of a curling iron.

“That son of a bitch always got between $7,500 and $8,000 in his pocket,” the sheriff is heard to say on the tape recording. “We’ll make some money if we don’t do nothing else. . . . Might as well, hadn’t we? . . . I can’t afford to kill him or I’d kill him, too. . . . If I don’t kill him he might kill them. . . . Once we stick that (the curling iron) up (him) he is going to forget us in a hurry. . . . Sometimes you got to break the law to help the law.”

Hilton, if anything, was blunter: “It’s going to be happening out at my house. . . . I ain’t going to say nothing because I’ll be one of the first ones that gets hung. . . . If we killed him we could . . . say we was going to question him . . . and his partner came out shooting at us. . . . Yeah, we’re going to take him out to my house. That way we’ll have electricity and everything, where we can hook the curling iron up. . . .”

Whatever remaining notions the federal authorities had that such comments might simply be good old boy talk were considerably diminished when Liddell on May 10 escorted Hankins on a surveillance mission to Cornett’s trailer outside Gainesville. The sheriff at one point, seeing a man near the residence, expressed the desire to kidnap him then and there, but Hankins pointed out that neither of them could even say whether this man was Cornett, since they didn’t know what the fellow looked like.

“We had our chance and blew it,” Liddell complained soon after. “We ought to have stopped and kidnapped him right then . . . all we had to have done was pull up there and say, ‘Are you Sonny Cornett?’ If he said yeah, stuck a gun in his face and say, ‘Get in the --- car.’ ”

When Liddell returned to the area of Cornett’s trailer again on the morning of May 18, accompanied by Hilton and Hankins, the federal authorities had heard and watched enough. By then, they were so sure the sheriff’s intentions were serious, they’d hustled Cornett into protective custody. FBI agents arrested Liddell and Hilton that same afternoon.

Plot Was ‘My Idea’

While driving the sheriff back to the Sherman jail after his arrest, FBI agent James Blanton later testified, Liddell allowed that the kidnaping plot “was my idea.” Blanton said: “Sheriff Liddell . . . was serious about this plan that was going to be initiated. He was very cooperative and had a lot to say. He was serious almost to the point of being obsessed. . . . “

It was mainly at bond hearings that these reports about their sheriff began to reach Love County citizens. Liddell and Hilton were held in jail for 28 days without bail before being released June 15--prosecutors and Magistrate Sanders feared they’d harm Hankins and Cornett if freed--so some 150 of the sheriff’s supporters filled the courtroom for each proceeding aimed at considering their release, one day presenting the presiding judge with a petition signed by 1,009 citizens, a good one quarter of the county’s voting population. Oklahoma Senate Majority Leader Darryl Roberts testified on the defendants’ behalf, as did Bank of Love County President Ron Bond and Johnston County Associate District Judge Bob Highsmith, a former Love County prosecutor.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Bert Garcia, apparently exasperated by this show of support, at one hearing asked a witness, Elvis Monkres, whether he and others might change their opinions if they heard the tape recording of the sheriff plotting to kidnap, rob, torture and possibly kill the suspected drug dealer.

“No . . . ,” replied Monkres, who is Liddell’s brother-in-law, an elder in the local Church of Christ and a former Ft. Worth policeman. “I just don’t have that much confidence in that tape you have. . . . “

Garcia then read a portion of the sheriff’s taped conversation to the packed courtroom--”That son of a bitch always got between $7,500 and $8,000 in his pocket . . .”--but this still did not sway Monkres.

“He is talking about a lot of sons of bitches out there, and we need them off the street . . . ,” Monkres said.

Questioning State Sen. Roberts, Garcia pressed: “Have you ever talked about going to Texas, kidnaping a Texas citizen, blindfolding him, bringing him back to Oklahoma and torturing him or killing him?”

“If I had, I would not tell you,” Roberts replied, provoking laughter in the courtroom. “As a (former) prosecutor, I was always amazed people didn’t take the law into their own hands.”

Soon after this testimony, Roberts took over as Liddell and Hilton’s defense attorney.

The revelations in the Sherman courtroom had such little impact at least partly because many in Love County just didn’t take the taped conversations seriously. “I’ve said things about my wife I wouldn’t want on tape,” more than a few observed. “I’ve heard lot worse from frustrated policemen,” others pointed out.

Besides, people added, Junior just never would have done that, no matter what he said on tape.

Officer Blamed

Looking for an explanation, and a source for all the trouble, more than a few turned to the Marietta policeman who’d reported and then bugged the sheriff. The plot was instigated by Tom Hankins, they said. He must have entrapped and guided the sheriff in their taped conversations. Tom Hankins wants to be important. He wants to be big. He wants to be a hero.

“I could just see that Tom Hankins squeezing it out of them,” Betty Anderson said.

In time, the talk about Hankins turned downright hostile. In his front page column, Marietta Monitor Editor Willis Choate compared the Marietta policeman to a “Judas Goat”--in ranching parlance, that being a goat used to lead sheep to the slaughterhouse. Others couldn’t help observing that Hankins, 45, was a “newcomer”--he’d been in the region only five years, and word had it he’d bounced around a number of places before reaching Love County. Hankins, it was also noted, was “a bit odd-turned.” He was all work without much camaraderie. He said “going” instead of “goin’.”

“I’d just as soon he leave,” said Ron Bond. “Most people feel that way.”

‘Can’t Understand’ FBI

Above all, though, folks in Love County railed at the federal authorities who were going after their sheriff instead of the drug kingpins.

“Can’t understand the FBI,” said Elvis Monkres. “They have all these resources, and they devote ‘em to locking up our sheriff instead of the drug dealers. . . . I see on TV all about the war on drugs. Where’s it at? Not here. Sheriff’s the only one doing war on drugs. . . . People down here, we just don’t understand these things.”

Neither, it seemed, did people from other locales. Once the initial news about the arrests reached the regional papers and wire services, letters from across the country began pouring into Love County, many containing money. A Berkeley policeman enclosed with his $25 check a shoulder patch from his department.

“I believe this is the damn-est (sic) thing I ever read or heard of,” wrote a rancher. “Just when I thought I had seen a slice of life, I read this. . . .”

“Back in Grampa’s day,” observed a local woman, “by now we would have hung the (suspected) drug dealer and taken the sheriff across the street to the Longbranch. . . .”

Fueled by such sentiments, some local citizens for awhile sounded more than a little enamored of the notion of using curling irons on drug dealers, even if Junior hadn’t been serious about the idea. A few allowed that, personally, they thought all known drug dealers should meet such a fate. As a gift, the sheriff in neighboring Carter County one day received a used curling iron in a small leather holster. Jane Lake told a local reporter she hoped to sell T-shirts emblazoned with a drawing of a curling iron, although later she insisted they’d never been ordered. “I feel like we’d make a mint if we did,” she said some time after her comments were first published.

Some Citizens Uneasy

In time, such talk began making some in Love County feel uncomfortable. Love County, they believed, should not be seeming to support illegal activities. The FBI, a few observed, was not in the habit of setting up small town sheriffs, and no one’s ever proved Sonny Cornett is any sort of drug dealer--in fact, Texas and federal authorities had insisted they knew nothing that implicated Cornett in drugs at all. Some thought it important to point out that Love County is full of law-abiding, God-fearing people, not a bunch of lawless vigilantes.

In his column, Choate--whose family has run the Monitor since 1901--obliquely referred once or twice to the “negative news stories” and “bad news” the case was bringing the county. Marietta’s mayor, James Moffett, proprietor of the local Hub Restaurant, spoke just as gingerly. “I’ve been criticized for not being a supporter,” he said, “but I feel like our judicial system is sufficient to prove innocence or guilt. It’s not proper for me to pass judgment one way or the other. I hope the publicity for Love County comes off positive.”

Even these types of careful comments, though, disturbed some of Liddell’s supporters. “Moffett is from Mississippi,” Bond pointed out. “He’s been here maybe 15 years, but he’s from outside. He doesn’t know the family trees.”

The internal county conflict eventually led to some refinement of positions.

“I did tell a reporter that if Junior wanted to take this guy and torture him with a curling iron, he could sell tickets to plenty of people,” Jane Lake took to explaining. “But I said it in the same way Junior said things on the tape. . . . I hope no one would think I’d really go watch that type of thing. I said it, but I wouldn’t do it. . . .”

The sheriff himself, when he has spoken, has voiced much the same type of sentiment. He’s insisted he had no intention of kidnaping anyone. “They say talk is cheap,” he has observed, “but for us it’s been pretty darn expensive.” Most notably, Liddell has not, through all the proceedings, seemed particularly worried about the coming trial’s outcome, even though it will unfold across the Red River in Texas.

“We’re not going to prison,” the sheriff predicted one recent evening, calmly smiling as he eyed his co-defendant and lawyer. “You will not find 12 people to say we’re guilty.”