The Case of the Farmer in the Dell

In May of 1973, Mr. Horace Gray, a dairy farmer, was found in one of his cattle pens with a big hole ripped in his side and the rest of him was beat up pretty badly. In that same pen was one of the bulls the farmer used to breed his cows.

Knoxville had just annexed the area into the city limits because the Industrial Development Board had purchased options on about two hundred acres there for the development of a new industrial park. It was still pretty rural with rough roads and not many residents.

The man's wife, Lucille, had found him in the pen with the bull when she came back from shopping that afternoon. She called the Knoxville Police department to report that her husband had been injured and she thought he was dead. The Knoxville PD dispatched an officer and the EMT's to the farm. The EMT's took one look and called dispatch for the coroner and a detective. That detective was Harry.

When the EMT's got there, they knew the man was already dead. Besides the gaping hole in his side, his chest cavity was crushed and he had multiple wounds to his head and arms. The officer at the scene was a former farm boy and said it looked like Mr. Gray had gone into the pen with the bull and the bull had attacked him.

The EMT's weren't so sure since there was some blood on the ground but it didn't look like there was enough to indicate the man had bled out there. They had a reasonable counter to that opinion, that being that all the rain that had fallen that day might have diluted the blood or washed it away.

Harry had the coroner's crime scene techs make a sweep of the entire farm looking for evidence, but like most farms in the area when it rains a lot there was mud everywhere. There were tire tracks and footprints all over the place but none were definitive enough to indicate somebody other than the farmer and his equipment had been there.

The coroner's conclusion was that Mr. Gray had been gored and trampled by the bull and had ruled the death to be an accident. The only evidence Harry had to the contrary was that the coroner at the time said the hole in the man's side looked a little bigger than the horns on the bull, but the bull had probably tossed his head and ripped the hole open.

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When Harry handed me the case file he frowned.

"This case stunk to hell because it wasn't logical at all. That's why I never closed it. I had an uncle who raised cattle and I spent some time working on his farm baling hay once I got old enough. Every summer, he'd tell me to never, ever go into any cattle pen if there was a bull in it. He said even though the bull might look tame and quiet, bulls were unpredictable. One second they could be just standing there and the next they'd be trying to grind you into the ground.

"Bulls look fat and lazy but they can run faster than a man and they're way stronger. One summer when I was there, one of his bulls broke through a fence made with six inch posts and two by twelve pine boards. He was trying to get to a cow on the other side of the fence. Just broke through four of those two by twelves like they were popsicle sticks.

"I know that no farmer who had even one bull would ever go into a pen with one. If he needed to catch the bull for something, he'd do what my uncle did. He'd put some feed in a bucket and rattle the bucket until the bull came into the barn. While the bull was eating, my uncle would stand on the other side of the stall partition and clip a bull staff through the ring in the bull's nose. A bull staff is a thing that looks like a shovel handle, but instead of a shovel blade, it has a strong snap on the end for the bull's ring. That bull staff gave him enough control to at least keep the bull a few feet from him because a bull's nose is really sensitive.

"Once he had the bull staff clipped to the ring, he could usually lead the bull to wherever he needed him, but he always had a second man along who carried an axe handle. If the bull started acting up, the second man would hit the bull with the axe handle to remind him who was in charge.

"I remember that my uncle had one bull that got wise to what the bull staff meant. He wouldn't let my uncle get anywhere near him with that bull staff. My uncle got three other farmers to help load the bull into his cattle trailer. Then he drove the bull to a sale barn and sold him. He said there was no sense in keeping a bull that he couldn't handle.

"By the time I'd graduated from high school, my uncle had sold all his bulls and was using artificial insemination to breed his cows. He said he was getting too old to be risking his life by taking care of a bull.

"What I thought at the time and still think is that it wasn't an accident. It could be that somebody pushed Mr. Gray into that cattle pen with the bull and the bull killed him, or somebody killed him and then put him in that pen so it would look like the bull had killed him. I just couldn't find a way to prove that. Maybe you and Rochelle can."

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The Rochelle Harry spoke of is Rochelle Mason. She's a writer of murder mysteries that she bases on cold cases we've solved. I'm Richard Owens, a cold case detective for the Knoxville, Tennessee Police Department. We also live together because on our first case together, we discovered we had something in common. Rochelle seems to get really aroused about three to four times a week and Rochelle getting aroused means I get to settle her down again. Sometimes it takes more than once to get her settled back down, but I don't mind at all.

We don't live together just because of the great sex though. Like all people, we each have our likes and our dislikes. We live together because our likes and dislikes tend to be the same. When they aren't, we can talk it out and agree. Someday, we'll get married. We've talked about that quite a bit, but both of us have been married before and it didn't work out. We just want to make sure this time.

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Rochelle chuckled after she read Harry's investigation report.

"The coroner said the man was killed by a cow?"

I nodded.

"Yes, and from what I understand, it's happened before. I don't know much about cattle, but you've seen the bulls in rodeos and in bullfights in Spain. They're big enough and strong enough to kill a man. There's always at least one bull rider who gets hurt every year, and once in a while a matador gets gored by a bull and dies."

Rochelle shook her head.

"If they're that dangerous, why would a farmer have one?"

It was my turn to chuckle then.

"Well, unless you've forgotten your basic biology, you need a bull to make baby calves and you need calves to get the cows to give milk.

"Anyway, Harry told me he didn't think this was any accident because he knew a little about bulls from working with his uncle. He said no farmer would ever go into a pen with a loose bull. He didn't think this farmer did either. He thought either someone put him in the pen with the bull and the bull killed him, or someone killed the farmer in a way that made it look like the bull did it and then put him in the pen."

Rochelle frowned.

"I'll have to think about this one for a while. I don't know anything about cows except that they give milk and they taste really good when they're grilled over an open flame. I think I'll spend some time and see what I can find out about Mr. Gray first."

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Besides the name of the killer, there are three things a homicide detective has to find out in order to get an arrest warrant and a subsequent conviction. Those three things are sometimes abbreviated to "MOM".

The first "M" stands for "motive" and means the killer had a logical reason to kill the victim. The motive need not be logical to the detective. It only has to be logical to the killer. That's one of the hardest parts of being a detective. A detective has to be able to get into the mind of the killer, and that's usually not a comfortable place to be.

The "O" stands for "opportunity" and means the killer had some point in time where killing the victim was possible if not conducive to killing the victim. It might be just happenstance or it might be planned, but some how, the killer and the victim were brought together close enough for the killer to strike.

The last "M" stands for "method" and is the mechanics of the killing. Common methods for male killers are shooting, stabbing, and beating the victim to death. Men tend to be physical when they kill, and generally want some quick confirmation that their victim is dead. The way to do that is to be close to the victim when he or she dies. Common methods for female killers are poison and drugs. In general, female killers don't use force as a method because most women aren't as strong as men. Women who kill usually know their victim and they don't want to watch their victim die. They prefer poison or drugs so they can be somewhere else when their victim expires. Of course, there are exceptions in both cases.

Of the three, method is usually the easiest to figure out because the coroner's examination of the body will tell the detective what killed the victim. The method is also not particularly useful until the detective has the name of a suspect. Anyone with a common steak knife can stab another person to death. It's only once the detective has the name of a suspect that he can try to tie that steak knife to the killer.

In this case, I figured I had three possible methods.

The first, and the one the coroner believed to be the method, was that Mr. Gray could have just trusted the bull not to hurt him and walked into the pen. The bull reacted by smashing him into the ground and goring him with its horns.

The second, and one that Harry had proposed, was that someone could have put Mr. Gray in that pen somehow and then watched as the bull did the actual killing.

The third, also proposed by Harry, was that someone had killed Mr. Gray in a manner that looked like the injuries a bull would have created if a bull had done the killing, and then put him in the pen so the bull would be blamed. Given the unusual injuries Mr. Gray had sustained, I didn't see how that method would have been possible.

At this point, none of the three methods were obvious, and none of the three could be proven with the evidence available at the time. That's why the coroner ruled it an accident.

Determining who had an opportunity to commit the murder is harder because a lot of murder victims are not found where the actual murder occurred. They're found somewhere else and are placed there in order to confuse the detective about who might be the killer.

I couldn't work on opportunity until I had a suspect because assuming someone other than Mr. Gray himself was responsible for his death, anyone could have had the opportunity to do either of the second two methods.

Motive is probably the most difficult of the three to determine, but ends up being the most useful in identifying a suspect. Almost all murders are committed for a reason. The killer doesn't just walk up and shoot or stab the victim. The killer kills for a variety of reasons. The top two are money and infidelity by one spouse, but jealousy, rage, revenge, and even love are also on the list.

That left me with motive to work on. Since in most murders, the killer and the victim at least know of each other if they're not actually pretty close, I started my investigation by looking into Mr. Gray's family and business.

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Harry's report indicated he'd already done a criminal background check on both Mr. and Mrs. Gray. I didn't bother repeating it for Mr. Gray. I did run Mrs. Gray through NCIC because she might still be living, but didn't find anything.

I also ran Mrs. Gray through the Tennessee DMV to see if she was still alive. Apparently she either wasn't or had stopped driving because her driver's license had expired in 2020 and she hadn't renewed it. Either was possible because she was born in 1938 and would be eighty-six now. I made a copy of her license for Rochelle.

My next stop was the County Clerk's office. About any legal thing a person does, like getting born, getting married, buying or selling property, or dying ends up as a document in the County Clerk's office. The girl at the desk, Dorene, frowned when I made my request.

"You want anything we have with the names of Horace Gray or Lucille Gray...all the way back to 1933?"

I said yes. Dorene frowned again.

"We can help you out as far back as 1974. We only keep records here for fifty years except for birth records. Those we keep for a hundred years so we go back to 1924 for those. Any records before that are in the Tennessee State Library and Archives. We just sent out everything for 1973. You'll have to call them for anything before 1974."

I figured that would be something Rochelle would like doing, so I asked Dorene if she'd look at everything from 1974 on. She said she would, but it would take her a few days. I said I could wait and thanked her.

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That left me with not much else I could investigate. Ordinarily, I'd request a warrant to look at the finances of both Mr. and Mrs. Gray, but since he was dead and I had no idea if Mrs. Gray was still alive and still had a bank account or where that bank account might be, that would have to wait.

The only other thing I could check out was if the farm was still there or not. If it was, I could drive out there and have a look at where the buildings were in relation to the cattle pen. If somebody had killed Mr. Gray and then dumped him in the pen, they'd probably killed him in one of the buildings. That would explain why the EMT's thought there wasn't enough blood where Mr. Gray was found for the cattle pen to be the location of the murder.

I thought it was pretty unlikely that the farm was still there since there had been a lot of development in that area since 1973. I could have driven out to the address Harry had in his report, but I figured Google Earth would tell me if there was still a farm there.

Harry's address wasn't really an address because Knoxville hadn't yet given the little county roads street names in 1973. His directions said to turn onto Ball Road off the Oak Ridge Highway and follow Ball Road for two miles to a gravel lane. The house and barn were about a quarter of a mile up that gravel lane.

I found Ball Road on Google Earth and started following it. Instead of a gravel lane two miles from the Oak Ridge Highway, it turned out to be a two-lane blacktop named "Dell Road". It had houses on each side and ended in a cul de sac with houses all around it and a gazebo in the center. Behind the houses were more houses and streets that ran back out to Ball Road. I didn't count the houses, but it looked like there were at least a fifty.

Well, so much for driving out there to look at the crime scene. The whole thing was gone. It did give me an idea though. If the farm had been developed into a small subdivision, it was sold at some point. I thought it would be interesting to know when that sale took place, who sold it, and who bought it.

If Mr. Gray had sold his farm to a developer before his death, that wouldn't have raised my suspicions. What would raise my suspicions and give me a possible motive is if Mrs. Gray sold the farm after Mr. Gray's death. Mrs. Gray would inherit the farm upon Mr. Gray's death and a developer would pay a lot for farmland. There are no trees to deal with on farmland and the land is already relatively flat. All the developer would need to do was cut some roads and start building.

I didn't know what the farm would be worth in 1973, but the current going rate for farmland in the area was about five thousand an acre. According to the analysis I found, farm land in the area had been going up in value at a rate of about two and a half percent a year since WWII. That would make the value per acre in 1973 about fourteen hundred an acre.

That's what another farmer would have paid for the farm in 1973. If the farm was sold to a developer, the value would have been a lot higher. Currently in the Knoxville area, developers were paying about twenty thousand an acre for farmland. They'd split an acre into two, half acre lots, and build a quarter-million dollar home on each. Based on current prices, a developer back in 1973 would have paid about six thousand an acre for the farm.

If Mrs. Gray had sold the farm right after Mr. Gray's death, it could mean that she'd killed him or at least been a part of the plot that killed him. People have been killed for less money, a lot less.

Unfortunately, I'd have to wait for Dorene to send me what she could find before I knew the date, who actually sold the farm, and who bought it.

For lack of something better to do, I looked at the crime scene pictures again. I'd looked at them briefly before, but now, I was looking for anything that might lend credence to one of the three methods by which Mr. Gray died.

The picture of Mr. Gray's body was pretty horrible. His intestines were partially out of the hole in his side and his face looked like he'd been hit with a rock several times. His chest looked pretty flat too.

I put that picture down and looked at several others taken from different angles. One that struck me as odd was that Mr. Gray was lying at least fifty feet from the fence around the pen. Mr. Gray wasn't a small man by any measure, so for someone to take his dead body into the pen and put him where he was found would take more than one person or some sort of cart or maybe even a truck or tractor.

It was possible the bull had just tossed Mr. Gray around enough to carry him from wherever he started out to that point, but there was a problem with that theory. According to the Coroner's report, Mr. Gray's injuries were all on the front half of his body. I'd seen videos of rodeo bull riders being tossed by a bull and they landed however they landed. I thought it unlikely that if the bull had moved Mr. Gray around the pen, the bull would have always kept him face up.

Another thing caught my eye in another picture. Mr. Gray was wearing leather work shoes when he was found, yet the pasture where he was found looked like it was basically mud. Water, mud, and leather shoes don't work well together. If you get them wet, you have to dry them out and the leather gets pretty stiff in the process. Mud on leather shoes would just keep them wet longer, probably long enough at that time of year to cause them to mildew on the inside.

I have a pair of leather work shoes I use when mowing the grass and doing other things outside. They were expensive and I was pretty careful about getting them wet. When I do anything outside with water, like watering the flowerbeds or washing down the patio behind our house, I wear a pair of rubber boots.

It surprised me that Mr. Gray would walk into mud in a pair of leather boots. The only reason I could think of was that Mr. Gray thought there was some sort of emergency so he didn't change shoes before going into the pen. I had no idea what might have constituted such an emergency.

So, all I had so far were contradictions. The location of Mr. Gray's body told me that he'd gotten there either by walking or because the bull had put him there. That supported the Coroner's ruling that Mr. Gray's death was an accident.

Yet, the fact that he wasn't wearing rubber boots even though the ground was muddy told me that somebody had at least put him in the pen. Whether he was alive or dead when they did it was another question, but like Harry, I doubted that a farmer with experience in handling bulls would ever just walk into a pen with a bull.

I'd about exhausted all the avenues available to me for the time being, so I went home to see if Rochelle had come up with any more information.

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Rochelle didn't look happy when I walked into our living room. I asked her what was wrong. She just sighed.