MANCHESTER, Kentucky -- Rodney Miller has
lived nearly all his 56 years in Clay County, the only exception
being when, as a young man, he moved to Indianapolis. He lived in
the big city for two years without ever knowing his
neighbors' names.
"The best people in the world live
here," says Miller, sitting in the
office of the Manchester Enterprise, where
he directs advertising sales. "Down
here, everybody knows everybody else."
Bill Sparkman was not from Clay County. A 51-year-old
Florida native, Sparkman lived in neighboring Laurel County. Yet
when Sparkman's body was found hanging
Sept. 12 in a cemetery a dozen miles east of Manchester, the
media seems to have placed blame for the apparent murder on Clay
County.
The community has suffered plenty of bad publicity in recent
years, with a long-running federal corruption investigation that
has resulted in vote-rigging charges against eight local
officials. The county also has a reputation for growing marijuana
and producing illegal methamphetamine. And on top of these local
P.R. problems, the murder also gave national media a chance to
recycle stereotypes of rural Kentuckians, much to the annoyance
of Clay County residents like Miller.
"Ignorant, backwards
hillbillies," he says, recalling a
recent cable-news report about
Sparkman's death in which the reporter
evidently sought out his network's idea
of the perfect interview subject for any news story from
Kentucky: A toothless, ill-shaven man in overalls.
Yet the Sparkman murder provided liberal bloggers a chance
to create an entirely new stereotype of Kentuckians as violent
right-wingers. Sparkman was employed part-time by the Census
Bureau. When his nude body was found hanged from a tree, his
federal identification card was taped to his shoulder and the
word "FED"
had been scrawled on his chest.
An Associated Press report said the FBI
was "investigating whether
anti-government sentiment" played a
role in Sparkman's death. Law
enforcement officials criticized that story, but the liberal
blogosphere seized on it as proving that conservatives had
fomented a killing rage among the yokels.
"Send the body to Glenn
Beck," Internet pundit
Rick Ungar proclaimed Thursday,
also indicting Minnesota Rep. Michelle Bachmann (a Republican who
had warned that census data could be abused) among right-wingers
presumed complicit in Sparkman's
murder.
Saturday, the Atlantic
Monthly's Andrew Sullivan fretted
over "the most worrying
possibility," namely that
Sparkman's death was
"Southern populist terrorism whipped up by the
GOP and its Fox and talk radio cohorts."
Rodney Miller dismisses such speculation with blunt
language -- bovine excrement, so to
speak -- and explains that
"fed" as an epithet
has a specific localized meaning in Clay
County. "Half our public officials are in
jail and the other half have been indicted,"
he says, somewhat exaggerating the result of the federal
corruption probe. "So, yeah, there are
a lot of a people here who don't
like
'feds.'"
Federal agents are also often involved in busting eastern
Kentucky's marijuana growers, who are
known to plant their crops in the Daniel Boone National Forest,
which encompasses much of Clay County. And the success of law
enforcement efforts against local drug traffickers
-- last month a multi-agency undercover
investigation called "Operation
Borrowed Time" resulted in more than 50
drug arrests in the county -- may have
heightened the animosity toward government officials snooping
around, as Sparkman's Census job would
have required.
The FBI and Kentucky State Police, who are leading the
Sparkman investigation, refuse to discuss possible motives for
his murder. Asked about the theories being discussed on the
Internet, KSP spokesman Don Trosper said,
"It's
just speculation and rumors.…We concern
ourselves with facts."
Local folks have their own speculation and rumors
about the case, most of it centered on the possibility that
Sparkman somehow fell afoul of local drug dealers, who may have
mistaken his federal identification for proof that he was an
undercover informant. One man who lives in London offered a
variation on that theory: Perhaps Sparkman actually
did report on suspected drug-related
activity, and his murder was an act of revenge by associates of
someone arrested as the result of a tip from
Sparkman.
The ghastly cruelty of Sparkman's
death would seem to indicate that the person or persons who
killed him had extensive acquaintance with violence. Were I to
join in the speculation game, my hunch is that whoever killed
Sparkman has a lengthy criminal record. There are other rumors
and theories about the case, both here in Kentucky and on the
Internet, which I won't bother to
repeat now. But several people have called attention to the fact
that Sparkman's death occurred more
than 30 miles from his London home, and that there were
reportedly no signs that he put up a struggle.
So much for speculation. What is striking to a first-time
visitor to this region is the vast distance between the media
perception and the reality.
At the London exit off I-75, there is a Starbucks, that
ubiquitous symbol of 21st-century
American civilization. Drive east for 20 minutes, and the parkway
exit at Manchester is surrounded by other all-American
enterprises like Wal-Mart, McDonald's,
Subway and Wendy's. Teenage boys hang
around the shopping center near the Family Dollar store after
school, riding their skateboards on the sidewalk.
Yesterday, I ate supper at the Pizza Hut in Manchester,
where people were clearly more concerned about the Clay County
High School football team --
"Once A Tiger, Always A
Tiger," the
waitress's T-shirt declared
-- than with
"anti-government
sentiment."
When police finally make an arrest in
Sparkman's death, the suspect will be
considered innocent until proven guilty.
Shouldn't the same be true for the rest
of Clay County?
