A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

THE

BOY

IN

THE

MOVIE

LEXINGTON

1990

Five weeks after the tragedy that will forever change his life, the little boy can't sleep. He toddles into the living room at 5 a.m. to watch a videotape of his favorite movie, Batman.

The movie's images flit across the screen, and Chris Earley sees it all happen again: There is the tall, shadowy man pointing a revolver at a young man and woman as their little boy watches.

The boy in the movie, who will grow up to be Batman, is helpless and terrified.

There are gunshots and two young parents dead.

On a street in Gotham City, Batman's parents are very still; suddenly he is all alone.

In the parking lot of a Lexington dry cleaners, Chris' parents were very still; suddenly he was all alone.

It's not real; it's just a movie.

It is real. It happened those long weeks ago.

What do you see when you watch that videotape, Chris Earley?

Do you remember what happened to you and your own parents that morning last April? Do you know where Mommy and Daddy are, and will you remember their faces?

In your child's mind is it Gotham City just after midnight or North Limestone at 7 a.m.?

Can innocence survive staring down the 4-inch barrel of a blue-steel Smith & Wesson?

Chris Earley was exactly 2 years, 3 months and a day old when the orphan-maker came. A man driving a silver Chevrolet Malibu gunned down Chris’ parents, Eddie and Tina Earley, after ramming their Chevrolet Cavalier in front of the Earley Bird Cleaners on North Limestone. Eddie and Tina were there with Chris to open up the dry-cleaners for another day of business. But just as Eddie was getting out of the car, the man with the .357-caliber Magnum roared up and started shooting.

A bullet grazed the second toe of Chris' left foot, but he survived. His parents didn’t.

Chris' paternal grandparents, Rosie and Lee Roy Earley, assumed permanent legal guardianship several weeks later, and now the new family is learning to cope with the loss of its loved ones.

But this is not a story about death and unhappiness. It is about the power of childhood.

In this one, innocence triumphs over evil. It was a child who led Lee Roy and Rosie Earley through the blackest days of their lives. And it is a child who makes this Christmas season, the first without Eddie and Tina, worth stringing up lights for.

"I think it makes it a little easier that we have Chris," Rosie says.

"He's a lifesaver," says Lee Roy, hugging Chris. "Oh, it would have been impossible without him."

Make no mistake, Christmas will not be easy. It was Eddie and Tina's favorite holiday, and they loved to decorate and give gifts to each other and to Chris.

They spoiled the boy, bought him anything he wanted, Rosie says.

The procession of gifts would begin weeks before Christmas so Chris could open them and play with them. Then Eddie and Tina would rewrap them and put them back under the tree.

"This is all they lived for, is this little jewel right here," Lee Roy says, hugging Chris.

"It's a little harder," Rosie says of Christmas this year. "But then you stop and think: It was their time of the year, and they'd want us to give him a good Christmas."

So, for the first time ever, this year you can drive by and see Christmas lights strung outside Lee Roy and Rosie Earley's little stone ranch house.


It was that house on Kingston Road that Eddie and Tina had moved into just weeks before they died. They were going to live with Eddie's parents so they could start saving money to buy their own house.

On the morning they were killed, the couple were running behind schedule. But as Tina waited by the front door to leave, Eddie picked up Chris and carried the boy toward the bedroom in the back of the house where the boy's grandmother lay.

"Let's go tell Rosie 'bye," Eddie said.

Moments later, Eddie and Tina piled into the car with Chris and headed for the family business, Earley Bird Cleaners, on North Limestone Street. And Rosie went back to sleep.

She did not wake up until the phone rang half an hour later.

It was one of Eddie's sisters. There had been a shooting at the cleaners, according to the news on the radio.

Rosie Earley hung up the phone and tried calling the cleaners but got no answer. Her stomach yanked into a knot, and her heart began pounding.

Rosie threw on a pink robe over her nightgown, and she and Lee Roy climbed into their blue-and-silver van.

They headed east down Kingston Road to where it ties into U.S. 27-68 north of town. And they turned toward Lexington.

Strangely, the world looked normal. The commercial strip along North Broadway was shuddering to life for another day, and traffic was heavy. But nobody driving past could have sensed the fear in the shiny van headed south.

The van rushed past a Speedway, a Waffle House, the Harley Hotel and the interchange with Interstates 75 and 64. It rolled along beside the railroad track that runs parallel to the east side of the road.

Eddie and Tina had passed this way just half an hour ago.

At the top of a hill just north of where North Broadway intersects New Circle Road, Rosie's body drew taut like a rubber band. She could see the cleaners.

Eddie and Tina's car was in front. And so were police cruisers. Rosie began to pray.

When Lee Roy eased to a stop behind three cars at the traffic light at New Circle and North Limestone, they were still a good hundred yards from the cleaners. But Rosie swung open the passenger door of the van.

"That's my baby," she cried as she started to climb down to the street. "That's my baby."

"You're crazy," Lee Roy said, trying to talk his wife back into the van. But Rosie was not about to stop.

She began running toward the cleaners, pink robe flapping crazily on the cool morning air.

She was breathless when she arrived, but she was too late.

There was nothing anybody could do.

In a way, Chris was lucky. He had loving grandparents to raise him after his parents were killed. And the prognosis is good for his toe, which doctors first thought would have to be amputated.

But what scars will Chris bear other than the disfigured toe? Was he so young that he will not remember the shootings?

Psychiatrists who are familiar with childhood trauma say his youth may be a blessing: He will not consciously remember the shootings.

There are subconscious demons. He still has nightmares, and his life since the shootings has been fraught with sleepless nights, painful shyness and jumpiness. When he first came home from the hospital, Chris would leap when Rosie dropped anything on the kitchen floor.

His life might be filled with buried fears he doesn't quite understand. But he seems to be getting better, Rosie says.

For one thing, he sleeps much more easily. It's nice to have a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle bedspread and pillowcases.

But for a child of almost 3 awash in a fantasy world of Batman and championship wrestling, the world can be a confusing, nebulous place.

In Chris' favorite movie, the young boy who will grow up to become Batman watches his parents gunned down by a tall, broad-shouldered man alongside an inner-city street.

Chris watches it often. At first, Rosie worried about that. But the movie doesn't seem to bother him, she says.

Still, who can say what thoughts and fears lurk in a child's mind? Psychiatrists say the distinction between fantasy and reality for children Chris' age is as blurred as it gets.

Just listen: It is a month after the shootings, and Rosie is explaining to a visitor how the Easter Bunny visited Chris when he was in the hospital.

The little boy did not care much for the giant rabbit, she is saying, when suddenly Chris speaks.

"Easter Bunny won't hurt me."

Rosie turns to look at him.

"No," she says softly.

"Easter Bunny won't hurt you."

When Chris gets old enough, Lee Roy and Rosie will reintroduce him to his parents. He will not forget them, Rosie vows.

Lee Roy and Rosie have thought a lot about the little boy's future. To their wills they have added a request that one of Chris' aunts get custody if something should happen to them. They are not young anymore, and Lee Roy had a heart attack four years ago.

But their biggest concern is keeping alive Chris' memory of Eddie and Tina. All his grandparents are compiling scrapbooks of newspaper stories and pictures to show the boy. And they will give him reminders of his parents, personal belongings of Eddie and Tina such as Tina's collection of duck and unicorn figurines and pictures.

Lee Roy and Rosie will get all those things out of storage in the spring, when the weather is warmer. For now, it looks like a long, cold winter.

"He asked me one time where they were, and I told him they were in heaven," Rosie says.

"It hurts, but I just hug him and go on."

One day, Chris spanked a locket Rosie was wearing. In it were photos of his mother and father.

"Why did you do that?" Rosie asked.

"Cause they won't come home," Chris said.


On Dec. 14, a Fayette County jury convicted a tall, broad-shouldered man named Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr. of Eddie and Tina's murders. The jury recommended he be sentenced to the electric chair. Final sentencing is set for Friday.

Still, many questions remain unanswered. In Rosie's mind, Tina shields Chris with her body and Eddie shields Tina with his as the bullets begin to fly. They were a close family, fiercely protective of one another, and she is convinced they were in the end, too.

"Eddie and Tina were both fighters, now," Rosie says, her eyes filling with tears. "And I actually believe this: I think they held on just long enough to make sure somebody was there to take care of that baby."

Her voice catches. This will never be easy.

Even though the trial ended just as Rosie and Lee Roy Earley wanted, there is less solace to be found in the conviction and the death sentence than Rosie had expected.

"The trial kind of lifted a weight off our shoulders," she says. But that is all.

"It don't (make you happy) when you know somebody's going to die," she says, referring to Bowling.

Although the Earleys are angry at Bowling, they feel sorry for his family. Lee Roy even approached Bowling's mother, Iva Lee, in the hallway of the Fayette County Courthouse during a recess in the trial and, just outside the elevators on the third floor, took her hand in his.

"I know you hurt," Lee Roy said. "That's your boy."

"We feel for her," Rosie says, "but she knows why her son's going to die.

"We don't know why ours died."

No motive was brought out during the trial, and the absence of one makes the tragedy that much harder to bear. Lee Roy and Rosie did not know Bowling, had never seen him before, and are certain Eddie and Tina had no idea who he was.

"The hardest part is knowing they're laying out there," Rosie says, motioning toward Lexington Cemetery as she sits in her living room.

"The next hardest part is not knowing why."

Although police have investigated the possibility that Bowling mistook the Earleys for another couple against whom he was thought to have a grudge, Rosie dismisses such a theory.

"I don't believe it, unless he couldn't see straight," she says.

"But he sure saw straight enough to kill them."


The double grave in Lexington Cemetery is decorated for Christmas.

Out in the real world, only five shopping days remain. But it is peaceful here under the barren flowering crab apple that shades the graves.

Even with the soft rumble of traffic in downtown Lexington, even in mid-December, the sound of a few hearty birds chirping in the trees can be heard.

Artificial flowers are lined up across the base of the stone, blue ones on Eddie's side and purple ones on Tina's. Both have their favorite colors.

And sticking out of the ground several inches in front of the row of flowers is a row of small, plastic Christmas decorations: Santa heads, hearts, snowmen, trees.

"Who's there?" Lee Roy asks Chris softly, pointing toward the graves.

"Snowman," says Chris, who has spied the little plastic figurine from his perch in maternal grandmother Billie Mogan's arms.

Lee Roy tries again. "Do you know who's there?" he says, pointing again.

"Santa Claus," Chris says.

Far away, out beyond the stone walls of the cemetery, below the steel-gray December skies, a siren wails.

"Police car," Chris says without lifting his weary head from his grandmother's shoulder.

GHOST

STORY

PIKEVILLE

1990

Elsie and Troy Deskins of Pike County were profoundly unhappy with each other during most of their stormy 30-year marriage.

But not even in death do they part.

The Deskinses, who divorced in 1947, still are bound together in a convoluted legal battle that has survived 43 years, a handful of lawyers and Troy's death. Elsie, who turns 89 in March, is suing her ex-husband, who has been dead for 20 years and 13 days, for a patch of land in Pike County.

Troy's widow, Hazel Deskins Burke, also is named in the lawsuit.

The case could wind up in the Kentucky Supreme Court early next year, and it could set a precedent for dealing with battered spouses. But the dispute first arose soon after the Deskinses divorced in January 1947. Less than a month later, Elsie discovered that in the divorce settlement she had lost a tract of land that had been in her family for generations. And she asked Pike Circuit Court to set aside the agreement.

But Elsie withheld evidence that would have helped her otherwise doomed cause: She did not allow any of her seven children to testify, nor did she let her parents take the stand. She did not even tell her parents of the property dispute.

Not until 36 years later did her reasons become clear. That is when Elsie finally began trying in earnest to regain the land through the lawsuit that now sits on the brink of the state's highest court. Only then did she divulge the darkest secrets of her marriage.


The world was innocent when Elsie Maynard met Troy Deskins almost 75 years ago. Nobody had heard of a war with Roman numerals after it, and Elsie had never been struck in anger with a tree limb.

Elsie met young Troy when he began hauling dry goods for his uncle's store. Troy was an angular man with piercing blue eyes who rocked on his heels to make himself appear taller.

Sally Hatcher, the oldest of Troy's and Elsie's nine children and one of seven who lived to adulthood, remembers her father vividly even today. "He was a short man," she says.

"So was Hitler."

Troy frequently stopped at Joseph and Zetta Maynard's remote farmhouse on the 58 Mile Branch of Coon Creek as he drove his wagon from Pikeville to Johns Creek. Elsie, the Maynards' daughter, fell for the guest, and they were married in 1917. She was 15; Troy was 21.

The honeymoon did not last long.

When Troy caught Elsie riding a horse without permission, he whipped her with a tree limb, court records say. And when he found her improperly spacing some beans she was planting, he beat her with a limb again.

Troy made a living farming and making moonshine, and at his request Elsie helped sell the whiskey -- even though she was ashamed and embarrassed by it. She didn't dare cross him.

"If anything didn't go to suit him, he would whip me," Elsie testified.

It was in 1921 that Elsie's parents deeded her some property from her grandmother's estate. The land amounted to the lower portion of the Maynards' property on 58 Mile Branch.

The Maynards, who were wary of Troy and who feared Elsie might allow Troy to get the property from her, attached strings to the land: The deed prohibited Elsie from selling or giving away the property without their consent and said that if Elsie died without any heirs, ownership of the land would revert to the Maynards. Elsie's choice

Elsie, a bulky, big-boned woman known up and down Johns Creek as "Big Mom," spent much of the next 10 years on the run. Troy was becoming more and more abusive, whaling away at his wife with sticks and boards and fists. Elsie often fled through the mountains, running several miles on foot, to seek refuge at her parents' house.

After one such run, her mother had to soak Elsie's dress off her back. It had stuck to the bloody flesh that had been sliced open by blows from a tree limb.

Finally, Joseph Maynard forced his daughter to make a choice: "You're welcome to come back here," he said, "but I'm not going to raise the kids of Troy Deskins."

Although Elsie was convinced Troy would kill her, she was determined not to abandon the children. She went back to her husband and stayed near the children constantly. They became her protection and her reason for living, her suit says.

In 1931, the Maynards deeded to Elsie and Troy the upper tract of their 58 Mile Branch property. Whereas the tract deeded to Elsie 10 years earlier had come from her grandmother's estate, this land had been purchased by the Maynards.

Neither Elsie nor her parents, who were illiterate, realized that the deed for the second tract replaced the 1921 deed. But it described boundaries that encompassed both tracts of land, effectively doing away with all the restrictions on Elsie's ability to sell the lower portion.

Elsie's suit contends the Maynards were tricked.

Life was hard during the Great Depression, but Troy began tasting success in the 1930s. He hauled miners to mine sites, rented houses at the Orinoco mining camp and, finally, acquired a mine of his own.

As his financial status rose, Troy gained political influence and was able to swing elections. He also became popular with women. Elsie testified she knew or suspected of affairs Troy had with at least seven women.

He bragged that he "just about owned Pike County." And he wielded even more power at home.

One day he came home and ordered three of the children out on the front porch, where he told them they should drop to their knees and thank God they still had their mother.

The day before, Troy explained to his children, he had come to the house bent on killing his wife.

In a deposition taken in 1986, Troy's half sister, Hazel Reed, recalled:

"If everything didn't go his way, he'd move heaven and hell on earth until it went his way."

One afternoon in 1936, Troy stormed into the house while Elsie and the children were eating an early supper. He was angry about something, and his yelling and cursing caused Elsie's stomach, which was swollen with their unborn son Kelly Brian, to tighten in dread.

She left the table and shut herself in the bedroom, but Troy followed.

Sitting at the supper table, Hazel Reed heard a crash and started for the bedroom. She found Elsie lying on the floor, draped over a rocking chair that had been knocked over on its side.

Leaning over Elsie was Troy, his blue eyes flashing, his fists pumping.

Hazel knelt and put her hands between the fists and Elsie's face, absorbing the blows with hands that soon would develop large, blue bruises.

That night, after Troy had left, Elsie began convulsing and was rushed to the hospital so her baby could be saved.

"I come from a world of beatings," Kelly Brian once testified.

The children did not escape Troy's wrath.

Sally says her father beat all the children but her. To Sally, he gave the only color copy of a photographic portrait of himself.

But Sally had seen too much violence. "I could no longer support my daddy," she says. "I idolized him, was in awe of him. He educated me on his knee and named me after his mother. But I was the only one who got that treatment."

Finally, in 1945, Troy asked Elsie to sue for divorce.

While the proceedings dragged on, Troy provided his family no financial support. He cut off Elsie's charge privileges at the company store, forcing her to buy the family's groceries elsewhere.

And Troy abused Elsie in an attempt to get her to sign property agreements. He threatened to kill her if she fought him, and a day or two before the divorce became final and the settlement was signed, he raped her.

"I couldn't take no more of it," Elsie said. "I just had to give it up, give it to him and let him go."

Still, she had no intention of letting Troy have the one tract of land that had belonged to her grandmother. She did not know that farm was included in the property settlement until days later, when she heard Troy had kicked a tenant off what she had thought was her land.

But when she tried to get it back, she did not tell the court of Troy's threats to kill her or of the rape.

Nobody would learn that until almost four decades later.

"It was a disgrace," Sally says. "We were considered one of the outstanding families in the community. And we never told anyone. . .

"Those are things you don't tell."

For 36 years, Elsie lived with her dark secrets. She did not have the courage, strength or money to fight for what she believed was right.

She lived in fear of Troy's burning down her house in Pike County. Kelly Brian later testified that his father had threatened to do just that.

Elsie also feared Hazel Deskins, her husband's new wife. Hazel made no secret of the fact that she and Troy did not like paying alimony and child support and vowed they "were going to do something about it," according to court records.

Kelly Brian testified that he went hungry and wore socks with holes in them while his father drove a Cadillac and Hazel wore furs.

When Troy died on Thanksgiving in 1970, he left behind words of caution for Hazel: His family might cause trouble over Troy's leaving each child only $1, he warned.

"If they do, they will wake up in hell," court records quote Hazel as saying.

Word of the conversation did not take long to reach Elsie through friends and relatives.


The ghost of Troy Deskins was waiting for Elsie Deskins in February 1983, ambushing her in the doorway of an office building in Northern Kentucky.

She began to cry and shake uncontrollably as her daughter held open the door; Elsie could not bring herself to enter the building, where she was supposed to meet with an attorney to discuss getting back the land.

"It's all right," Sally Deskins said gently, but both she and her mother knew it was not.

All the old fears were flooding back. This was not the first time Elsie had tried to see an attorney about seeking to have the divorce settlement reversed. At least half a dozen times before, she had ridden with her oldest daughter to some law office in some town to try to turn her life around.

But each time, even with Sally at her side, Elsie had become violently ill at the thought of what she was about to do. She could not go through with it.

The danger of fighting back was more than Elsie could bear. On that day in 1983, Troy had been in the ground in Pike County for 12 years, two months and 22 days, but the fear Elsie had learned during her marriage to him had persisted even through divorce and death. The story of her life is a ghost story, a tale of a woman haunted.

Psychiatrists call it battered spouse syndrome.

One even compared Elsie to a whipped dog.

So nobody is quite sure what reserve Elsie drew on that bright winter dayin 1983, where she finally found the strength and courage at age 80 to walk back up to the building and through that door.

Maybe it was because she had sworn to Sally on the family Bible -- the one with all the children's birthdays written in it in fading blue ink -- that she would do it this time.

"You can't do it, it's all right," Elsie heard her daughter say as they walked back to the car. And that is when it happened.

"Take me back," said Elsie, still shaking, as they were about to get in the car to leave.

"I'll walk in if I die trying."

On February 17, 1984, Elsie asked the Pike Circuit Court for relief of the 1947 divorce judgement. In 1985, the court overruled Elsie's request without a hearing, saying it had been too long coming.

On appeal, the case was sent back to Pike County with instructions that Elsie deserved a hearing. If she could prove her allegations, the higher court said, she would be entitled to relief.

But after hearing the case in 1988, the Pike County court denied Elsie's motion, and, represented by a new team of attorneys, she appealed again in September 1989.

But the second time around, the Court of Appeals said too much time had passed since the divorce settlement to change it.

Elsie's attorneys, who contend it is not too late to fight for the land, have asked for the state Supreme Court to hear the case. They say an allowance must be made for Elsie's suffering battered spouse syndrome.

Sheryl Snyder, the Louisville attorney Sally retained with the help of the local spouse abuse center, thinks this could be a precedent-setting case.

"Women may not be able to assert their rights for a long time," he said. "The courts are going to have to come to grips with that."

The defense disagrees. "We don't have any problem with battered spouse syndrome, but we don't think it applies in this case," said Pikeville attorney and Democratic state Sen. Kelsey Friend, who is representing Hazel Deskins Burke, Troy's widow.

Friend refused to discuss the case in detail. When asked how he would defend against the lawsuit, he would only refer to the appeals court's ruling.

That ruling, written by Chief Judge J. William Howerton, cited the length of time elapsed between the divorce settlement and the suit as the justices' primary reason for agreeing with the Pike County court.

"If we allowed 40-year-old property settlements to be upset in this manner," Howerton wrote, "there could be no finality to property rights."

Snyder and Michelle Turner, Elsie's attorneys, argue against that point in their request for a hearing by the Supreme Court. If the appeals court had thought too much time had elapsed when it first saw the case, "it surely would not have ordered the Pike Circuit Court to go through the expensive and time-consuming procedure of holding a hearing," they wrote.

The time interval, not the level of abuse, makes the case unique, says Terry Parsons, director for the Center for Women and Families in Louisville. The agency is the one that helped Elsie find an attorney.

"What makes it not only unique but terribly encouraging is this is a woman who has been battered almost beyond belief but who has recovered to the point where it is still important to her to recover what she lost," Parsons says.

"This woman is terribly strong. There is a steel core there someplace."


Sally says it was a phone call from an attorney who was doing land research for a coal company that spurred Elsie to make a final effort to regain the land.

"That convinced her it was hers," Sally says.

Elsie, who had a stroke a year ago, explains in choppy, strained sentences why she finally decided to take control of her life:

"It's mine. Cause my mommy, my mother give it to me.

"I was afraid of him. I was afraid he'd kill me if I done anything. But what is right to do. It's theirs (her children's), and I want them to have it."

Her greatest fear now is that she will die of old age before the battle is won. "I'm just afraid the Lord'll take me."

Today Elsie stays with her children, usually Glentis in Northern Kentucky or Sally in Louisville. She does not want to return to the house in Pike County.

Fighting for her land has not provided her release, has not eased her mind. Fear still gnaws at her. She spends her days at Sally's house seated beside a table with the old family Bible on it. It serves as a reminder of her resolve.

So does Sally, even though she closely resembles the man who haunts them both. "I am her strength," Sally says.

"Sometimes it gets on my mind," Elsie says of her past, "and I just go wild." She leans forward in a chair in Sally's living room.

"I wanted my home," she says, her voice rising in anguish. "They (the tracts of land) was mine. He took 'em from me."

Elsie gasps, struggling for more words, but they won't come. Her eyes are full of tears, as they are whenever she talks about Troy and the land.

Sally sniffles, too. Life has not been easy and never will be for the Deskins children and the woman who bore them, she says. Sally, a retired schoolteacher, sought counseling in the 1950s in an attempt to overcome the emotional scars of growing up with her father. None of the others did.

"We are all strong people, except we have emotional problems," Sally says.

The legacy of violence endures. It is almost as if Troy Deskins lives.

"He controls our lives," Sally says, "to this day."