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Overview
On January 23, 2000, already battered by an ice storm, the rural Alabama resort town of Mentone was about to be struck by an even more terrifying freak catastrophe. Hurtling down the highway in a Lincoln Town Car was Hayward Bissell, a 400-pound madman on a murder rampage. Ramming the pickup truck of Don and Rhea Pirch, Bissell lured Don Pirch on to the road, running him down with his car.
Dead Reckoning
Bissell next targeted the home of James and Sue Pumphrey. After stabbing James Pumphrey in the stomach, Bissell was thwarted by two family dogs, who gave their lives to protect their owners. Their sacrifice bought Pumphrey enough time to get a gun and scare off Bissell--who didn't know the weapon was actually inoperable.
Dead End
When Bissell was finally stopped, police discovered that he wasn't alone. Occupying the passenger seat beside him was the mutilated, partially dismembered body of his pregnant girlfriend, Patricia Ann Booher.
In February 2002, Bissell pled "guilty but insane" and was sent to prison for life. Was he really crazy? Or was he crazy like a fox, turning it on and off to try to beat a death sentence for Booher's murder. . .
Includes 16 Pages Of Shocking Photos
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780786036233 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kensington |
| Publication date: | 11/11/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 579,066 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Blood Highway
By SHEILA JOHNSON
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
Copyright © 2004 Sheila JohnsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7860-3623-3
CHAPTER 1
"At first, I thought it was road rage."
Rhea Pirch drove slowly and carefully as she and her husband, Don, headed into Mentone on Alabama Highway 117 on the afternoon of January 23, 2000. It was a cloudy gray afternoon and the patches of treacherous black ice forming on the already wet pavement were difficult to see. As the Pirches drove toward home, returning from a weekend trip, the storm damage along the highway grew increasingly worse and a light freezing drizzle continued to fall.
When the couple suddenly felt their truck bumped from behind, they knew they'd been rear-ended and assumed that the big car that had been following them a bit too closely had hit an icy patch of pavement, sliding into the back of their pickup.
Rhea pulled over onto the next side road, County Road 641. She looked into the rearview mirror and saw an older model, light-colored Lincoln following her into the turn and slowing down behind them. She stopped the truck, and her husband got out of the passenger's side of the pickup. Don was still moving stiffly from the three broken ribs he'd suffered at work a couple of weeks earlier. Unwilling to risk a fall into the ditch beside the road, he didn't go to the rear of the truck to check for damage. Instead, he walked around the front to flag over the Lincoln's driver as he turned the corner.
Rhea opened the driver's-side door and started to get out when Don stopped her.
"Hand me the insurance card and paperwork out of the glove box," he said, "and I'll exchange information with this guy when he stops."
Rhea scooted back into the truck and leaned across to get the materials Don needed. As she rummaged through the glove compartment, another impact jolted the truck and she instinctively ducked down. She heard a sickening crunch as Don began to shout.
Oh my God, he's hit us again, Rhea thought, assuming Don was yelling at the driver to stop. Nothing could have prepared Rhea for the terror of what took place next. When she looked up, she saw her husband hanging on to the hood of the Lincoln, being carried away down the road at an increasingly high speed.
Seconds earlier, as Don Pirch had come around the front of the pickup and waved at the Lincoln, its driver had pulled up behind the truck and gradually slowed to a stop. The man behind the wheel looked back in his rearview mirror at the road behind the two vehicles, slowly turned his head to look from side to side, then looked straight ahead at Don and floored his gas pedal. The car lurched forward and slammed into Don, throwing him off his feet and up onto the Lincoln's hood.
As Don began to slide off the hood, he felt himself being dragged underneath the speeding car. He panicked, but still kept holding on for dear life, managing to pull himself back up onto the hood. He grabbed the rear edge of the hood, grasping for a secure hold and feeling the windshield wipers giving way beneath his fingers. Don said a silent prayer of thanks that the car had such a big, flat hood; at least he was able to hang on to it with the car traveling, fully accelerated, down the highway. Don felt his boots strike against the bumper, and he got a foothold and used the extra leverage to push himself up farther onto the hood.
Then he raised his head, looked up and found himself face-to-face with a nightmare looking back at him from the other side of the Lincoln's windshield.
Don was staring directly at the car's driver, but all he could see was the man's eyes. Everything else around the two men suddenly seemed to go black, as though they were the only two people inside a long, dark tunnel. Don couldn't see anything else inside the car; he couldn't see the pavement rushing beneath the Lincoln's wheels or the blur of ice-coated underbrush on the sides of the road as they sped by. All he could see were those cold, deadly eyes filled with contempt and hatred.
"At first, I thought it was road rage," Don said. "Then I looked into his eyes and I saw he was a madman."
Rhea watched, paralyzed with fear, as her husband was carried away down the road clinging onto the hood of the speeding Lincoln. She could hear Don yelling for the driver to stop as the car continued to accelerate, but the horrifying ride was far from over.
Don knew the car was going much too fast for him to risk trying to jump off, and he kept hoping that maybe the driver would stop or at least slow down. All he could do was attempt to keep holding on as the car sped down the highway.
"I kept yelling for him to stop, asking him why was he doing it, why, why ... but he just kept going; he kept it floored," Don said. "The look in his eyes brings chills to me now. I'll never forget that; those eyes looking right at me."
Then the driver glared furiously at Don. He held his middle finger up to the windshield in an obscene gesture, and Don knew that, one way or another, his ride was about to be over. The look of hatred on the man's face told his unwilling passenger something was about to happen, and Don tried to prepare himself for whatever was coming. He prayed the driver wouldn't slam on the brakes and throw him forward off the hood, then drive over him.
Without warning, the Lincoln suddenly swerved hard toward the left. Don went flying off the hood and was thrown head over heels, landing hard in the icy ditch beside the road. As he hit the frozen ground and rolled into the ice and mud in the bottom of the ditch, Don felt a sharp, tearing pain in his knees and feared that his legs had been broken.
The Lincoln didn't stop, or even slow down. It kept on speeding down the road until it disappeared out of sight over a hill. Rhea sprinted down the highway to her husband's side, terrified that he was seriously injured. Don was afraid the driver might turn around and come back to attempt to run down his wife. As he lay helplessly in the ditch, he knew he had to send her away to safety. If the madman returned and she was still standing there beside the road, Rhea would be an easy target.
"Go back and get help," he gasped as Rhea reached his side. "Go back down to the main road and flag somebody down. Hurry!"
Rhea turned and ran back toward Highway 117 as fast as she could, frantic with fear. She knew she was running for her husband's life.
CHAPTER 2"It was like he didn't have a soul."
James Pumphrey had been busy cooking all day on Sunday, helping his neighbors who might find themselves without electricity for several days during the ice storm. Earlier in the day, James and Sue loaded their truck with several large plastic tanks and bottles, which they had filled with spring water, hauling enough water from a nearby stream for everyone in the neighborhood whose electric water pumps were inoperative. Then at midafternoon, the middle-aged couple sat down to an early supper. It had been a quiet, peaceful day, the silence broken only by the loud, cracking sounds of breaking trees as the accumulating ice weighed their branches down. It had also been a very busy day, and the Pumphreys were tired. They were glad to have a chance finally to sit down and rest for a while.
After supper, as James stood at the sink washing dishes and looking out the kitchen window at the ice glistening on fallen pine limbs in his front yard, he realized a car was sitting across the road inside the gate to his neighbor's pasture. The trunk lid was raised and had been left up, and a big man was walking up the road toward the house. James and Sue's chocolate Labrador retrievers, Reese and Cocoa, barked a warning at the man who was now starting up the driveway. The dogs had never in their lives shown any aggression toward a stranger, but James watched in surprise as they began growling and ran down the drive to meet this man with their teeth bared. The hair on their backs stood up and they sniffed the air as they challenged him, barking furiously.
James assumed the man's car must have hit a patch of ice and slid off the road; he didn't notice that the locked pasture gate was standing open because it had been rammed. As he stepped out onto the porch to see if the stranger needed any help, he saw his two dogs charge toward the man. He watched, shocked, as the female dog jumped up and snapped at the intruder's hand. The man struck back at the dog, and she turned and ran up the steps and onto the porch.
Things began to happen so quickly, James thought perhaps the dogs had bitten the big man. Then he saw that Cocoa was bleeding, and noticed for the first time that the man now approaching the porch steps was covered in blood. James knew instinctively that something was terribly wrong, and he asked the man, "Did my dogs bite you?"
James turned around and looked on the porch behind him, trying to see what had happened to Cocoa. When he turned back around, the stranger was in front of him, standing on the bottom step. With no warning, without saying a word, the big man reached up and struck deep into James's abdomen with the large, sharp knife he was carrying.
Confused and unsuspecting, James never saw the knife hidden in the intruder's huge hand. Even if he had seen the man was carrying a weapon and was preparing to use it, the attack was so sudden that there was no way to defend against it. James didn't even realize he had been stabbed in the stomach until he noticed the blood gushing from the deep wound, and he had no idea how seriously he had been injured. James managed to stagger back inside the door as the attacker followed him up onto the porch, his knife slashing furiously at the dogs who tried to protect their master from the deadly intruder.
"Whatever you do, don't open that door, I've been stabbed!" James yelled to his wife. But before they could close and lock the door, the stranger reached inside and grabbed Sue by the collar, trying to pull her outside onto the porch to continue his murderous attack. As he held on to her with one hand, he kept stabbing at the dogs with his long knife as they snapped and bit at him.
Sue screamed at the man, crying and begging him, "Please don't do that to my dogs," but he kept pulling her from the doorway, staring at her with eyes that showed no sign of human feeling. Sue knew she should expect no mercy if her attacker succeeded in dragging her out onto the porch.
"I'll never forget his face," she said, "and I'll never forget his eyes. That's what caught my attention, with everything going on so quickly. His eyes were just unreal. It was like he didn't have a soul."
Sue was almost in shock and unable to fight her way free of the madman's grip, but the dog she dearly loved, who was almost like a child to her, was ready and willing to sacrifice himself to save her. The male Lab, Reese, continued to attack the intruder after his mother, Cocoa, lay on the ice in the front yard, dying from her wounds. When Reese saw his mistress in danger, he quickly worked his way between her and the stranger. The dog fought with all his might, and when the man let go of Sue to fight back, the heroic Lab gave his life to buy Sue enough time to get inside the house and lock the door.
"If it weren't for our dogs, we wouldn't be here," Sue said. "They were just like our babies. We never had any kids, and we loved them dearly. They saved our lives. They were our angels. A lot of people might not understand that, but they did what they did to give us enough time to get back in the house. They saved us. They knew what they were doing."
While the crazed attacker turned his attention to Reese, stabbing the brave dog to death and cutting his throat, all but decapitating him, James and Sue managed to get to the bedroom, where a rifle and shotgun hung on the wall over their bed. In their struggle to get the .22 rifle down from the gun rack, one of the rounds fired accidentally, striking their freezer, which sat in the next room.
Through the kitchen window, the couple saw the man had finished mutilating the bodies of the two dogs and was heading around the trailer to the back of the house, looking for a way to get inside and finish them off. Sue tried to help James stand and hold up the rifle, and they both held the stab wound in his abdomen, where his internal organs were threatening to spill loose. Their only chance to save themselves was to get to the back door before the man could break in, and try to confront him with the rifle. They struggled to the door and onto the back porch, and as the attacker came around the corner of the trailer, James and Sue raised the rifle and pointed it in his direction.
"It took him and me both to hold that gun up," Sue said. "He went down on his knees and I had to help him."
James told the intruder, "You take another step and I'll kill you." The man ignored the warning and kept coming. James tried to fire the rifle, but for the first time since he'd owned the gun, it jammed. The Pumphreys thought they were doomed, but luckily, the intruder didn't realize the rifle had misfired. He saw the weapon, clearly realizing the threat that a firearm presented to him, and spoke to his victims for the first time, saying, "Don't shoot me, I'm leaving!"
The big man turned around and ran back down the driveway and across the road toward the car he'd left parked by the pond in the pasture. Moments later, the Pumphreys heard the car's engine roar to life and saw the Lincoln speeding back down the road toward Mentone.
"If I had got the shotgun down out of the gun rack, I would have killed him," James said. "But I got the .22 instead. It had never jammed before; not one time since I'd had it had that gun jammed, and I've shot it hundreds of times. The way I look at it, the Lord God did it because He didn't want that man's blood on my hands."
James was quickly beginning to go into shock from his critical wound, and later said that he couldn't remember crossing the yard and getting into his truck with Sue's help. He didn't realize that he blacked out momentarily as he sat in his driveway trying to start the truck's engine, and barely knew he was driving the truck slowly down the road toward Highway 117 to look for help.
Sue tried frantically to keep James awake as he drifted in and out of consciousness on his way down the icy highway, and she was terrified that the truck would slide off the road at any time. When she saw a group of people and several vehicles pulled over along the side of the road, a wave of relief washed over her. With her help, James managed to get the truck stopped just seconds before he slumped over the steering wheel.
"Somebody help me; James has been stabbed; please, I need help!" she screamed, jumping out of the truck and stumbling toward the crowd.
Sue had no way of knowing the crazed, knife-wielding stranger had gotten there first, and the people were gathered there on the roadside to give emergency care to someone who had already looked into those same cold, merciless eyes.
CHAPTER 3"There's a body in the car!"
Walter Pullen kept an eye out for stranded drivers as he steered his tractor up Highway 117's steep curves from Valley Head. He drove through Mentone toward the Georgia state line to help other volunteers and utility workers who were busily clearing the roads on top of the mountain. Along the highway that Sunday afternoon were the usual number of cars that had slid into ditches and trees that were lying across driveways — the typical problems that went along with episodes of freezing rain in the wooded mountain areas of North DeKalb County. Walter knew he'd see the usual amount of winter-weather emergencies, but the last thing he expected to see that day was Rhea Pirch running frantically down the highway toward him, waving her arms and screaming for help.
Rhea couldn't believe her luck when she realized the man on the tractor was going to come to her rescue. Her lungs were burning as she gasped for air and tried to tell him what had happened to Don.
Walter Pullen was astounded to hear that Rhea's husband had been intentionally run down on the road, and as she ran back to stay with Don, Walter hurried to one of the nearby homes where he knew the residents had a rescue squad radio that could summon help even though the phone lines were down. Within a matter of minutes, volunteers from the Lookout Mountain Rescue Squad began receiving reports of a hit-and-run victim in need of immediate medical attention on County Road 641. With help on the way, Walter started back to do whatever he could for Don and Rhea.
James McCray had driven into Mentone to pick up a generator and was returning home when Rhea flagged him down. Don still lay shivering in the ditch, where his attacker had thrown him, and he was getting dangerously chilled and was on the verge of going into shock. James began to work with Don, trying to do whatever he could to help Rhea keep him warm until a DeKalb Ambulance Service vehicle could make it up to the top of the icy mountain.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Blood Highway by SHEILA JOHNSON. Copyright © 2004 Sheila Johnson. Excerpted by permission of KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
THE HORROR,Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Dedication,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
Prologue,
Chapter 1 - "At first, I thought it was road rage.",
Chapter 2 - "It was like he didn't have a soul.",
Chapter 3 - "There's a body in the car!",
Chapter 4 - "My foot is broke.",
Chapter 5 - "He's eating the evidence!",
Chapter 6 - "This is all a mistake.",
Chapter 7 - "If I never see another naked four-hundred-pound man, it'll be too soon for me.",
Chapter 8 - "I probably need to start reading.",
Chapter 9 - "He is absolutely, certifiably crazy as hell.",
Chapter 10 - "Dispel the ugliness and restore it with honor.",
Chapter 11 - "He griped as a child, and he griped as an adult.",
Chapter 12 - "She never was a very good judge of character when it came to boyfriends.",
Chapter 13 - "Get away from him and leave him be.",
Chapter 14 - "Her face was red, like she'd been crying.",
Chapter 15 - "There was a woman with a cat.",
Chapter 16 - "She's deader than hell.",
Chapter 17 - "I'm not exactly normal.",
Chapter 18 - "A person doesn't bleed as much as you would think.",
Chapter 19 - "We've exhausted all our personal and family resources.",
Chapter 20 - "The look in his eyes tells it all.",
Chapter 21 - "When Hayward's on his medication, he's as sane as anybody else.",
Chapter 22 - "His plane was grounded and not allowed to fly to Georgia.",
Chapter 23 - "Guilty but insane.",
Chapter 24 - "I thank the Lord God he'll be locked up ... where he can't hurt anyone else.",
Chapter 25 - "All I can tell you is watch out, he is slick.",
Chapter 26 - "He's not a damn bit crazier than I am.",
Chapter 27 - "[Darrell Glen Smith] told his sister he could kill his mother and get away with it.",
Chapter 28 - "Patricia was afraid of Hayward for the last month of her life.",
Chapter 29 - "I don't think things are going to work out for me.",
Chapter 30 - "I'm easy to get along with. Plus I am a very nice person.",
Chapter 31 - "There's a woman killed in the United States every fifteen minutes.",
Chapter 32 - "I just wish this wouldn't have happened, that's all.",
Epilogue,
Photo Inserts,
The Bad Nurse Teaser,
