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

RAINING

LIKE

TODAY

WHEATCROFT

1989

In better times, the names of Webster County coal miners are immortalized in ink on the back wall of the Miner's Diner.

But there is always the fear that some of them might be immortalized another way, with their names in stone.

That will happen this weekend as 10 miners who died in an explosion Wednesday morning at the Pyro Mining Co. mine near Wheatcroft are buried.

Their graves will be scattered through several Western Kentucky counties, but all will be mourned in Wheatcroft.

Residents of the tiny mining town along Ky. 109 are planning a memorial service for the dead miners, none of whom lived here but all of whom worked underground less than five miles away.

Wednesday's tragedy brought them face to face again with the nagging fear that haunts those whose lives revolve around coal mining, said Bobbie Witherspoon of Wheatcroft.

"We've grieved for years with these kinds of things," Mrs. Witherspoon said. "We're just traumatized."

Dorothy Beach, a waitress at the Miner's Diner, whose husband and son both work in coal mines, said, "It's affected the whole community.

"The people in the community, their hearts go out to the miners' families."

This week Mrs. Beach has remembered the agony 40 years ago of waiting for news of her own father's fate after the mine in which he was working exploded.

"It was raining like today," she said.

The smoke-gray skies over Western Kentucky yesterday seemed symbolic of the mood throughout the western coalfield area. Shock, disbelief and mourning were not limited to Wheatcroft. The flags flew at half-staff in front of the Sturgis airport, where Pyro keeps its offices.

The sense of loss so acute for some families was vague but disturbing for many others.

"Everybody's just in shock right now," said Brenda Robinson, who works at Bud's Country Corner near Morganfield. Roger Clifford and Mike Hedges, two of the miners who died, visited the store frequently, Ms. Robinson said.

Many residents of Wheatcroft, population 320, gathered as usual inside the Miner's Diner yesterday, but the conversation was different. The topic was how to organize a memorial service.

Less than two miles up Ky. 109, the big coal trucks rumbled out of Pyro's processing plant, turning onto the highway almost every 30 seconds.

Each truck's 40-ton load included coal from the ill-fated mine nearby, but it was not business as usual there. The mine has been closed since the explosion.

Usually many miners at Pyro visit the diner after they finish their shifts, owner Ann Davis said. Wheatcroft has little else besides a post office and a fire station.

For eight years the miners have signed the back wall near the kitchen, and the plaster is full of their names.

As for remembering the dead miners, "I just know this little town could hardly hold the outpouring," Mrs. Witherspoon said.

LEARNING

LESSONS

EDDYVILLE

1989

At most Kentucky schools, it is almost time for the big yellow buses to begin rolling up.

But outside Rick Balgavy's classroom, no buses are coming; no one is going home. Nobody is even looking out the window at the bright fall sky. There are guard towers and stone walls out there. Freedom's in here, in the words and numbers that serve as stepping stones to a General Educational Development certificate -- and a better chance of getting, and staying, out.

Inmates attending this academic school on the grounds of Kentucky State Penitentiary see a GED certificate as the key to many things -- including the front gate. The parole board looks more kindly on high school graduates.

''You need a GED to get a good job,'' says John Stinson of Louisville, a 24-year-old inmate convicted of theft, credit card fraud and being a persistent felon. ''I don't want to go out and come back.''

Stinson's fear of finding more trouble if he does not finish school is valid, prison officials say. Without a high school diploma or the equivalent, an inmate is more than three times likelier to return to jail within five years, Corrections Cabinet official Don Kenady says.

Eight of every 10 prison inmates in Kentucky -- a state that ranks near the bottom nationally for graduating high school students -- never finished school.

That does not mean Kentucky schools should shoulder the blame for the overcrowded prison system, says Ann Farmer, principal of the academic school at Eddyville. In many cases, the inmates at Eddyville failed school because they received no encouragement at home, she says. They turned to alcohol and drugs, then crime.

Still, there are lessons to be learned. Schools on both sides of the barbed wire should be measured according to how successful they are in elevating students above their backgrounds, Farmer says. There is liberation in that, she says; products of Kentucky's poorer school districts often live in a kind of prison all their own.

''One thing the public school system could learn is they should start a person where he is -- wherever that might be,'' Farmer says.

Inmates enrolled in the prison school progress at their own pace and often work with teachers one-on-one.

More and more of them realize the importance of getting a high school education, Kenady said. Every prison in Kentucky has an academic school, and enrollment has jumped from 1,469 in 1988 to 2,084 this year.

In 1987, 167 inmates received GED certificates; this year, almost 400 have.

Many of them have to start at a first-grade level. About 60 percent of the high school dropouts in Kentucky's prisons are illiterate, Kenady said.

The illiterate students at Eddyville are in Balgavy's class. There, 42-year-old Ray Kenneth Ham -- rapist, persistent felon and teacher's aide -- paces around a table of men wearing pea-green prison uniforms.

''Cop,'' Ham says slowly, reading from a book as the men listen intently, pencils poised.

''Just what we need, another cop.''

The men begin to write. Here, ''cop'' is nothing more frightening than a word to be spelled on a test.

There are modest incentives for them to succeed here: Graduates receive an American Heritage dictionary, a pizza and a diploma from the Lyon County Board of Education.

But there is little financial reward. Inmates are paid 40 cents a day for attending class and can get monthly raises to boost them to $1.20 a day. By comparison, a job in the kitchen pays $2 a day, and one in prison industries pays up to 65 cents an hour.

Inmates who go to school rather than work sometimes make sacrifices. They cannot afford coffee, cigarettes or shampoo from the canteen. Those who do not go to school, however, must work or face a one-time 90-day lockup restricting their freedom to roam the yard. And anyone hired for an industry job must be a high school graduate or a student working toward his GED certificate.

Altogether, 104 inmates are enrolled in the prison's academic school. A two-year college program has 14 students, and a hotel management course has 18, including death-row inmate Michael Clark, 37, of Arcanum, Ohio.

The enrollment rate at the Eddyville prison, which has a population of about 800, is remarkable in light of the kinds of inmates housed there, Corrections Cabinet Secretary John Wigginton said.

More than two-thirds of the inmates are serving sentences for violent crimes. The median sentence is 20 years, but that does not include 31 death-row inmates or those serving life sentences.

Most inmates at Eddyville are transferred here from other prisons because they are violent or disruptive or pose a threat to escape.

Donnie Hillyard, 28, of Marion, went to prison in 1979 for kidnapping, raping and murdering a 20-year-old woman who worked at a convenience store.

Now he has his GED -- he graduated from the prison school in 1980 -- and works as a teacher's aide in the adult basic education class.

Hillyard wants to learn a vocation ''so I can do something with my life.''

Ronnie Jackson, 36, of Louisville, enrolled in school on the advice of his children. Now that his children are in school, he wants to finish his education so he can be a better father, he says. ''I don't want to look foolish with my children.''

There are other, less noble reasons for enrolling, too, such as having an excuse to stay off the prison yard, which can be hazardous to your health.

''You have to have something to motivate a person, and getting out motivates people,'' Farmer, the principal, says.

This is education without mascots, football teams and cheerleaders. The school library has a card catalog whose drawers are devoid of steel rods, and the filing cabinets are padlocked with a long steel pole through the drawer handles.

But even though almost all the inmates disdained a public education, relatively few of them drop out of the prison school.

The results are modest, but expectations rarely are compromised. More than four years after he was convicted of armed robbery, Wayne Bell, 27, a 10th-grade dropout from Louisville, stalks out of his college-level English class without his books after getting back an essay marked B plus.

''I shoulda gotten an A,'' he says. ''I rewrote it and rewrote it.''

Teaching at the prison can be frustrating, too. But the job has its good points, the best of which might be an almost complete lack of outside pressures, instructor James Hubbard says.

He speaks in a hushed voice because nine inmates are taking the GED test in his classroom. Phillip Cooley, 23, of Maysville, is one of them.

After Cooley finishes in two hours, he stands, hands in the test, fires up a cigarette he rolled himself and walks outside.

He does not feel good about the essay question. ''I'm not gonna worry about it though,'' he says, smiling. ''I got 75 years to pass it.''

Two weeks later, instructor Joe Campbell hands Cooley his diploma.

Cooley tacks up a copy next to a reminder to call his son on the child's birthday. The real diploma he will send to his mother and father back home in Lewis County, 275 miles and a world away.

SCREAMS

FROM

AN

AMUSEMENT

PARK

CARROLLTON

1989


As she lay passed out in the back of a burning church bus, Carey Aurentz dreamed she was on a roller coaster that would not stop.

"I kept thinking, 'God, I'm going to die, there's no way I'm going to get off,' " the Radcliff teen-ager testified yesterday in Carroll County Circuit Court.

Waking up afforded her no way out of the nightmare: A trip to the amusement park really had gone horribly wrong.

Carey, now 15, was one of 63 Radcliff youths on board the ill-fated church bus that crashed and burned that night of May 14, 1988, on I-71.

The bus was returning from Kings Island amusement park.

Carey testified yesterday at the murder trial of Larry Mahoney, charged with 27 counts of murder in the wreck. He is accused of ramming the bus with his pickup truck while driving drunk.

Carey hobbled to the witness stand on crutches. Her right foot was burned so deeply it had to be amputated, said Dr. Mark Malangoni, a surgeon at Humana Hospital University in Louisville.

Malangoni testified that Carey, who was seated in the first row of the bus, had been burned over 60 percent of her body.

She spent two months in the hospital and has undergone surgery 13 times, she said.

When the bus burst into flames, dazed and frightened teen-agers began "pushing and shoving and practically running over each other trying to get to the back door," Carey said.

Most of her friends seated around her on the first rows of the bus died in the fire.

A box of tissues sat on the witness stand as Carey testified. She began to cry when Assistant Attorney General Paul Richwalsky handed her pictures of several of her friends for her to identify.

The pictures, taken before the crash, then were stuck onto a large seating chart of the bus at the front of the courtroom.

Carey said she had been talking to a friend across the aisle when the collision occurred. The friend, Emily Thompson, had invited her on the trip.

Carey, who was sitting sideways on the right front row, was knocked to the floor with her back to the front of the bus, she testified.

She rose to walk to the back of the bus, never again to see her seat mates, Kashawn Epheredge and Jennifer Arnett. Both died.

Carey was caught up in a tight crowd of panicky teen-agers, all trying to get to the emergency exit at the back of the bus, she said. Most were bigger than she. "I was trapped," she said.

She saw the glow from the fire behind her before passing out in the eighth row and dreaming of the roller coaster.

When she woke up, she began crawling over red hot seats toward the back of the bus, she testified.

At the door she stood and fell out onto the pavement of I-71.

"I was screaming, 'Help, someone help me, please,' " she said. Two other survivors, Cheryl Pearman and Jason Booher, came to her.

Jason grabbed her shoulders and Cheryl grabbed her legs and began to carry her away from the burning bus. But Cheryl dropped Carey's legs.

They were too hot to hold.


DOCTOR,
HEAL

THYSELF

ELIZABETHTOWN

1989

Dr. Fred C. Rainey was working late shuffling papers at his office when his life as the Citizen-Doctor began to crumble.

Sgt. Tommy Masterson, a detective with the Elizabethtown police, arrested the doctor at 8:45 p.m. Jan. 13 at the Woodland Medical Clinic.

Rainey, 58, a well-known and respected family practitioner in Elizabethtown, was indicted on one count of first-degree attempted rape, six counts of first-degree sexual abuse, four counts of first-degree unlawful transaction with a minor and 32 counts of third-degree sodomy, also involving a minor. Some of the charges allegedly involve patients, Masterson said.

Rainey spent the night of Friday the 13th in the Hardin County Jail.

Many of Elizabethtown's 17,000 residents were stunned. Most could hardly believe the news about Rainey. Here was a former president of the Kentucky Medical Association, former president of the state Jaycees, former vice president of the national Jaycees, former chairman of the Elizabethtown school board and the Kentucky Academy of General Practice's Citizen-Doctor of the Year in 1968.

Lost in the glare of Rainey's successful career and imposing reputation, however, was a little-known past filled with rumors, complaints, bitterness and outrage, public records show.

Trouble had nipped at Rainey's heels before, but he had stayed ahead of it.

This time was different.

"For years and years and years, I said, 'That man -- someday the truth is going to come out,' " said Linda Hall of Brandenburg, her voice cool and measured.


Mrs. Hall was a freshman at Meade County High School in 1959-60. Her name then was Linda Board. She was one of at least four freshman girls who became upset at the way the county health officer treated them during routine physical examinations in April 1960.

The health officer was Rainey, whom the board had hired March 16, 1960, on a part-time basis; he was to work in Meade County one day a week. Rainey lived in neighboring Hardin County, where he had begun a private practice.

The controversial physicals were given at the high school. Students were called out of class one at a time to an exam room near the office, Mrs. Hall said.

Linda Board left the exam room on the verge of tears.

More than nine years later, another woman who had been examined when she was a student said Rainey had been "too familiar" that day.

"I thought that he did some things that were not ordinary in a physical examination," said the woman, Priscilla Pursiful.

Mrs. Pursiful, whose maiden name was Priscilla English, was 14 when Rainey examined her. Her remarks that Rainey was "too familiar" and the exam "not ordinary" were made almost 10 years after the exam in a sworn statement given during Rainey's bitter divorce from his first wife, Ann.

After being examined, some of the high school girls began to talk. The prettier ones discovered they were not alone in their embarrassment and confusion, Mrs. Hall said. They also discovered that the heavy or unattractive girls were not upset by their physicals; they had not been examined in the same way, Mrs. Hall said.

Like Mrs. Pursiful, Mrs. Hall said she thought the examination she received was improper.

"It was a nightmare," Mrs. Hall said, "and it really bothered me a long time. I cried and cried and cried."

Mrs. Hall said Rainey took her behind a screen, out of sight of the nurse, and had her undress below the waist. Days later, during a special meeting of the health board, Rainey told parents that female students were required to remove only their blouses.

Linda Board was upset by the way Rainey touched her.

"He got down on his knees . . . and he would glare," Mrs. Hall said. "And he said, 'You are not in any way to tell anyone else what I've done.' He said if I told other girls, that would cause them to be frightened and he couldn't do the examination."

Two other women examined by Rainey that day said they, too, became upset. One is now a nurse. She remains convinced that Rainey acted improperly.

After the exam, Linda Board walked back to class in a daze. It was about noon. She sat at her desk and stared straight ahead.

After a while, she glanced around the room at her classmates, Mrs. Hall said. Their eyes told her: Something must have happened to some of them, too.

"I saw confusion," she said. "You remember the faces."

The talk began in hushed tones and ended in a clamor. "Things started humming," Mrs. Hall said. "Before school was out that day, it was hot."

So hot, in fact, that school administrators decided to call the freshman class to the gym after school to let Rainey explain the examination, records show. Empty buses idled in the parking lot as the meeting delayed the end of an already long school day.

Rainey told the students the examinations were routine and necessary.

Priscilla English, a popular student and cheerleader, rose from her seat on the bleachers and disagreed with the doctor -- right there in front of the entire Class of 1963.


The freshmen were given physicals only that one day, but the fallout lasted months.

Records of meetings of the Meade County Board of Health tell the story:

"The examination was the talk of the whole county," health board member Dr. George Clark said during a meeting June 29, 1960.

Parents had complained that the students were "handled roughly and indecently," records show.

Meade County Judge George R. St. Clair, chairman of the board, called a special meeting April 20, 1960, several days after the exams.

Parents crowded the room, and St. Clair "feared for Dr. Rainey. The judge said John English, Priscilla's father, had "threatened him" if Rainey were not fired.

Rainey told the parents the exams merely had included checking their children's eyes, ears, teeth, tonsils, throat, lungs, abdomen, heart and, in overweight girls, the thyroid gland.

At issue was the heart test, according to the minutes of the meeting. Rainey said he had monitored pulsations in the femoral artery, which runs through the groin.

Dr. Walter Morris, chairman of the health board in Breckinridge County, said he had asked Rainey to do the femoral artery check. In a sworn statement in 1969, however, Morris said a stethoscope, a blood-pressure check and some kinds of X-rays could be used to test for the same problems.

The people of Meade County were not easily placated during the special meeting in 1960, but members of the board rushed to Rainey's defense.

Board secretary Clarence Anton said he "could not think of anything more absurd, asinine or dastardly than the stories told about Dr. Rainey."

Board member Dr. Ronald Naser said Rainey was guilty only of being "more thorough than he should have been."

"Here in Meade County," board member Dr. Walt Cole said, "there are urban people who have come here to work; also there are many local, uneducated, narrow-minded people who must be taken into consideration."

Last week, Mrs. Hall agreed with Cole's assessment. "We were backward," she said. "That doctor was right. We were country people, and we were believing, trusting."

They also were 14 years old. "You put your trust in your superiors," she said.

Rainey resigned from the part-time job April 22, 1960. No charges were brought against him. Board members blamed his problems on "unfavorable publicity."

Mrs. Hall, however, thinks the fault was with Rainey. "He used his medical degree," she said, "as an act of God."

Rainey received his degree from the University of Tennessee College of Medicine at Memphis in 1955. He set up practice in Elizabethtown about 1957 and married his first wife, Ann, on June 1 that year.

The first of their two daughters was born in 1961; the second, three years later.

It was around that time that Rainey gave Pam Crane, a 13-year-old Elizabethtown girl, a "complete physical with a pelvic" examination for Girl Scout camp, according to a sworn statement taken during the Rainey divorce proceedings.

Rainey was the girl's regular doctor, but it was the first time he had given her a pelvic examination, court records show. At his Elizabethtown office, he asked Pam, now Pam Richardson, if she ever had had sex.

"I told him no," Mrs. Richardson said in her sworn statement.

Rainey argued with the frightened girl and threatened to tell her mother that she had had sex, Mrs. Richardson testified. "I was in tears before I left," she said.

When she got home, just a block away, Rainey already had called Pam's mother. The woman was crying.

About 1965, Rainey hospitalized Pam for pneumonia, according to her statement. "He came into my room on night rounds one night and told me he thought I had a kidney infection and that I should have a pelvic examination."

When Pam refused to let Rainey do the test, the doctor threatened to tell her father that her boyfriend had stolen a bottle of milk, she testified. She still refused.

Rainey denied most of Mrs. Richardson's statement in his own sworn statement. The "exam that was attempted" was not for pneumonia, he said. "She had a rather extensive inflammation of the pelvic area."

About 1966, Rainey asked Pam's mother if her daughter could work in his office at night stamping and addressing envelopes, court records show. Mrs. Crane said yes.

The first night on the job, Pam found herself alone with Rainey. As he helped the girl put on her coat at the end of the night, Rainey tried to kiss her, according to Mrs. Richardson's statement. Pam resisted.

As he drove her home, Rainey tried to hold Pam's hand, she testified. Again, she resisted.

An undercurrent swirled beneath Rainey's shining reputation, but only a few ever felt it. Court records show that around 1960, Rainey called 17-year-old Susan Alvey, now Susan Muchisky, and asked her if she wanted to go for a ride in his convertible. She admired his car, but told the doctor she would go only if

Mrs. Rainey accompanied them, Mrs. Muchisky testified in 1969. Rainey's wife was out of town, however, and Susan declined Rainey's offer, she said.

Less than a month later, as Rainey drove "up the Dixie," as U.S. 31-W is known in Elizabethtown, he saw Susan walking. According to Mrs. Muchisky's sworn statement, the doctor asked again if she wanted to go for a ride. She declined and told him he should not call her anymore.

"I was concerned because of my father," Mrs. Muchisky testified.

Susan Alvey was forming an impression of Fred Rainey that few others had.

To most Elizabethtown residents, the doctor was a community cog, a man above reproach.

He treated indigent patients and was active in the Jaycees. Said a friend, "You're talking about a man who's excelled in almost everything he's undertaken."

Life was fine when Rainey was still the Citizen-Doctor. In the summer of 1966, he and his wife started building a $50,000 house on Sunrise Lane, a shady street of success stories near Elizabethtown's Freeman Lake. The house was finished in February 1967.

In 1968, Rainey was named Citizen-Doctor of the Year.

Less than a year later, Rainey was wiretapping the phone in his own home.

Cassette tapes of telephone conversations between Rainey's wife and various men surfaced during their bitter divorce and custody battle in 1969 and 1970. The court record of Rainey vs. Rainey is a foot thick.

The judge who granted the divorce had a word for much of the evidence in the case: sordid. Each claimed the other had had affairs. They had separated in 1968, and Rainey, while still married to Ann, had taken a fishing trip to Florida with another doctor and 17-year-old Susan Monroe, his future wife, court records show.

Mrs. Rainey said in her petition for divorce that Rainey had spent the last six months treating her in a "cruel and inhuman manner." Rainey, in his divorce complaint, said his wife had done the same.

In October 1970, the divorce became final. Hardin Circuit Judge Howard Holbert awarded Rainey custody of the children, writing, "It just possibly may be that the difficulties between these parties have resulted in their having too much too soon."

Rainey's arrest last month "was a shocker," a friend said.

Gayle Ecton, who was superintendent of Elizabethtown's independent school system while Rainey served on the school board from January 1979 to December 1986, also was stunned by the news. "Obviously, it was a shock to everyone," said Ecton, who now is superintendent of Henderson County schools.

"He was an excellent school board member and was very dedicated in his performance. He certainly seemed to have the good of the school system and the students foremost in his approach.

"He was very professional."

Rainey was highly respected in Elizabethtown, Ecton said.
Many still trust and respect Rainey in spite of the charges against him. That includes Gary Foster, a pharmacist at Fort Knox, and his wife, Linda -- both longtime patients of Rainey. The Fosters, who live in Elizabethtown, visited Rainey at his Woodland Drive office less than two weeks after his arrest.

Rainey, who was released from jail Jan. 14 on a $25,000 property bond, is continuing to practice while he awaits trial May 15. He pleaded not guilty at his Jan. 24 arraignment in Hardin Circuit Court. He declined twice to talk to a Herald-Leader reporter.

Rainey's indictment "certainly hasn't bothered us," Foster, 43, said as he walked out of the clinic clutching a bill.

"No, not at all," his wife said. "He's not guilty. He's very trustworthy and he's a good friend."

Rainey's attorneys, James Gregory of Elizabethtown and Frank Haddad of Louisville, say the doctor has lost few, if any, patients since the indictment. "He's had a strong demonstration of patient loyalty," Gregory said.

The 43 felony counts against Rainey, which stem from alleged incidents between 1979 and 1986, involve three individuals, "some of" whom were patients of Rainey, Sgt. Masterson said. Two were minors at the time of the alleged offenses, he said; one is a male.

One of the counts charges Rainey with attempted forcible rape, six with forcible "sexual contact," four with engaging in "illegal sexual activity" with a minor and 32 with "deviate sexual intercourse" with a minor. Most of the charges allegedly involve the same person.

Masterson said detectives began investigating Rainey about three months ago after stumbling on evidence in an unrelated case that had culminated in the arrests of three Elizabethtown men on various sex charges.

Detectives still are investigating Rainey, Masterson said. The Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure also is investigating, general counsel David Carby said.

Rainey could lose his license, Carby said.

Gary Foster will not look for another doctor unless that happens.

"I think the people who really know him, this really isn't a problem," Foster said. "Now, the people up at work at Fort Knox that don't know him, they'll tell you the opposite."

People all over Hardin County are talking about Rainey, said Karen Hager, a hairstylist in Elizabethtown. "The whole town is abuzz -- all ages, all walks of life.

"Even if he weren't well known, the topic itself is something people like to talk about."