The American Spectator

The Spectacle Blog

This headline is blatantly misleading:

ANTI-CENSUS SENTIMENT
The recent hanging death of a census taker highlights growing controversies around the census.

The "hook" of Eve Conant's story is an unjustified assumption that Bill Sparkman's death in Clay County, Ky., was related to the 51-year-old's part-time job as a Census worker -- although the motive is unknown, no suspects have been identified, and law enforcement officials refuse to speculate about the case.

As a matter of fact, the dead man's 19-year-old son, Josh -- who was adopted as an infant by the unmarried Sparkman before he moved to Kentucky -- has complained that Kentucky State Police and other authorities refuse to rule out suicide as a cause of death:

"I look at it as disrespectful to be still throwing suicide and accident around," Josh Sparkman told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday. "He didn't do this to himself. That's dishonorable. My dad was a good man. No person on this planet is going to fight cancer like he did, then turn around and kill himself a year or so later."

Furthermore, the coroner and state medical examiner have ruled that Sparkman's death was caused by asphyxiation, without saying whether this was due to the rope around his neck. His mouth was reportedly gagged with a cloth, bound with duct tape, and this may well have caused Sparkman's death although, again, it's important to emphasize that officials in Kentucky refuse to confirm or deny key details of the case. 

However, officials have indicated that it was not a "hanging death" -- Sparkman's body was in contact with the ground when it was found, nude except for a pair of socks, according to the man who discovered the body. The rope around Sparkman's neck was tied to a tree limb, so as to suspend his body upright, but he wasn't dangling in mid-air.

Baseless speculation about this case -- and particularly, the attempt by some to make a political symbol of Sparkman's death -- was what motivated me to travel this past week to Kentucky, where I spent three days in Clay County and neighboring Laurel County, where Sparkman lived.

The involvement of the FBI in the case has resulted in an almost complete official silence from state and local law enforcement. However, residents of the area (including local journalists I interviewed at length) are profoundly skeptical of any suggestion that Sparkman was killed because of general "anti-government sentiment" (as the Associated Press was first to suggest) or the more specific "anti-Census sentiment" that is the subject of this Newsweek story.

"He knocked on the wrong door," was the way one resident described what most locals familiar with the case consider the most likely scenario for Sparkman's killing. As the Newseek story notes, eastern Kentucky is known as a haven of marijuana growers. The weed growers plant their crops in Daniel Boone National Forest, which sprawls across the mountainous region and encompasses half of Clay County,

What would be proven if we knew (as we do not) that Sparkman was engaged in Census work at the time of his disappearance -- most likely Sept. 9, three days before his body was discovered in the Hoskins family cemetery some 30 miles east of his home -- and "knocked on the wrong door"?

If the fatal door he knocked on was at the home of a marijuana grower or a drug dealer (methamphetamine and other drugs are also problems in the region), who killed him after mistaking Sparkman's federal identification as evidence that the stranger was a narcotics agent, is that an "anti-government" or "anti-Census" motive? Or is it merely a criminal seeking to prevent detection of his crimes -- the kind of killing that happens with unfortunate frequency in America all the time?

That, however, is strictly a hypothetical scenario. The haste of some journalists and bloggers to attribute Sparkman's mysterious death to a particular motive -- to give it a political meaning -- based on speculation and assumptions, is irresponsible in the extreme.

In a Sept. 28 front-page news article in the London (Ky.) Sentinel-Echo, the newspaper's managing editor Joseph Deal interviewed Kentucky State Police spokesman Don Trosper. Some widely quoted news accounts of Sparkman's death were based on "pure speculation," Trooper Trosper told Deal:

Trosper said it is official KSP policy "not to discuss ongoing investigations, especially specific evidentiary information. We will not talk about an investigation just to give information out there that could jeopardize the investigation. Our primary function is to investigate cases and bring positive results. A secondary function is things such as media contacts."
Trosper said he could not estimate how long the investigation would take, other than to say that "the investigation is ongoing and our officers are investigating it daily."
He said leaks, especially the dissemination of incorrect information, can be damaging to any investigation.
"Misinformation is much more damaging to our investigation than the correct or no information," he said. (Emphasis added.)

Bill Sparkman is dead, the investigation of his death is already three weeks old, and if this mysterious case is ever going to be solved, it won't be solved by uninformed speculation.