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VILLAGE VOICE
Published April 7 - 13, 1999
OVERKILL
BY GUY TREBAY
The Grand Guignol Murder of a Gay Man In
Virginia
Richmond, Virginia– Eddie Northington
was the type of guy a lot of people would probably have liked to
kill. He was big. He was aggressive. He was a wiseass and a loudmouth.
Lack of expertise didn't stop him from
holding opinions on a variety of topics, and he was not the least bit
shy about speaking his mind. He was less
inhibited still when he'd been drinking, which, over the past couple of
years, was a good deal of the time.
Once Eddie Northington had knocked back a six-pack of whatever bargain
beer was on special at the local Winn-Dixie,
he got to running his mouth. The things that came out were not destined
to win anyone a popularity contest.
He sometimes called gay people faggots and black people niggers and, unlike
a goodly number of his Richmond neighbors,
he did not do so exclusively behind closed doors. A psychiatrist might
talk about an Eddie Northington in terms of
compulsivity or distorted affect or deficient impulse control.
Being less occupationally compelled by the
subtle shadings of human nature, bartenders routinely eighty-sixed
him. Over the past couple years Northington had been tossed from several
Richmond hangouts for pawing fellow
patrons. He was someone who remained unpersuaded by a definitive no. "He
seemed clueless," says one bartender. "He
was friendly to the point of being obnoxious. Then he didn't understand
why people got so mad at him."
On March 1, someone apparently got enraged
enough at Eddie Northington to end his existence. Now, fully a
month after his death, Richmond police have still failed to release the
cause of death and the local medical examiner
has yet to issue an autopsy report. It has been suggested by some that
Northington's body had been found badly
beaten. It has been rumored that a note was found stuffed in the dead
man's mouth. The need for further messagery
struck some people as moot after the killing made local, if not national,
headlines.
Its savagery, they said, came with a pretty
potent symbolism of its own.
Unsatisfied merely with taking the 39-year-old
Northington's life, the person or persons who attacked him also
cut off his head. Then they carried the severed head a half mile through
scrub woods in a public park, climbed
65 tower stairs to a railroad overpass and placed it squarely in the middle
of a public walkway. It was discovered
there the following day by a young couple exercising a dog. As it happens,
the concrete overpass where Eddie Northington's
severed head was found is located in the middle of Richmond's most
popular gay cruising area. As it happens,
Eddie Northington was gay.
"It's one thing to kill someone, it's another
to cut their head off," police detective Thomas T. Leonard told the
Richmond Times Dispatch shortly after the
murder, adding that, "it may be a hate crime, it may be a sex crime,
it may be a ritualistic crime. We really don't have anything concrete–
no set way to go." The beheading came
in the wake of the February 19 bludgeoning and burning death of 39-year-old
Billy Jack Gaither in Sylacauga, Alabama;
it occurred the week jury selection began for the trial of Russell Henderson,
one of two men accused in the murder of Matthew
Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Yet despite the fact that the
National Lesbian and Gay Task Force asserted that the Richmond killing
"rings an alarm," both the FBI and
local police declined to classify the killing as a crime with roots in
bias.
Some in the local community found no such
ambiguity. "I mean, it's way, way overkill to cut someone's head
off," says Paige Armstrong, a bartender at
the gay nightclub Fieldens, where Northington was once a regular.
"The fact that they left the head at the Rocks"– as the cruising
area is known– "isn't an 'accident.' Nobody
here wants another Matthew Shepard circus, but to suggest that it's not
a hate crime is just mind-boggling."
Yet, in the weeks following the murder, there were no angry protests in
Richmond, no handbill campaigns, no
demonstrators from the capital city's sizeable gay population taking to
the streets in rage. There are reasons
for this and, as they always are, they were cultural. Richmond, according
to Sarah Chinn, an activist and lesbian
who teaches at nearby Randolph-Macon College, "is a very insular place.
Everything is covert. You get along here and
you don't make a fuss." The fact that a gay man could be found
murdered in a gay cruising area with his head
placed in the middle of a walkway without arousing much local outrage
would seem to strain the limits of dispassion. "Not a hate crime?" says
Chinn. "How can you possibly talk about
this and not say it's about him being gay?" You
can do it in a variety of ways. You can suggest, as some did, that Northington
was semi-crazy, occasionally homeless,
alcoholic, and so perhaps in a sense had it coming to him. You can ignore
the symbolism and pretend that the
crime was a fluke or aberration. You can suggest, as Loree Erickson, a
student at Virginia Commonwealth University,
and an activist with the school's Sexual Minority Student Alliance,
does, that, while you are "definitely struck by the horror of the killing,"
there is not enough "information to
make any clear actions." You can imply, as Jeremy M. Lazarus, a staff
writer at the city's largest black
newspaper, the Richmond Free Press, did to a reporter, that "it's just
as likely to be homeless guys who got
into an argument and one made his point plain to the other permanently."
You can insist, as Marcus J. Miller,
general manager of Fieldens, does, that "if I thought it was a hate crime
I'd be the first one standing on the
tallest building and screaming the loudest, but let's just don't jump
to conclusions."
Richmond, as Miller goes on to say, is a
tolerant city within certain limits. The shape of those limits, though,
is not always clear. The state of Virginia
still maintains a 49-year-old statute making a felony of that "crime
against nature" involving carnal knowledge
of another person by or with the anus or mouth. But antisodomy
laws are the least of it, really; Richmond
is a " 'You don't tell me your business and I won't tell you mine' kind
of town," says Miller, not so much
a closeted city as a muffled one. It is a place where the local ladies
clubs that maintain plantings beneath
an equestrian statue of Confederate hero Stonewall Jackson buy their flowers
from gay florists because, as Miller also
notes, "the best caterers in town are gay, and the best florists are gay,
and the best haircutters are, and everybody
knows it, but they don't make it into a big deal. It's a conservative
town, but it's not a hate town." During
the days I spent in Richmond, a death-penalty trial was getting under
way in another conservative town that
is not a hate town several thousand miles west. While the killing of Eddie
Northington merited a total of four
stories in the Richmond press, the national media had descended on Laramie,
Wyoming, to report on jury selection
in the first of two proceedings to try the alleged killers of Matthew
Shepard. There was extensive real-time
coverage of the Shepard case on Court TV and live feeds to the networks.
While the press routinely referred
to the trial of Russell Henderson as the "Gay Bashing Trial," none of
the 71 Wyoming jurors summoned to the
courthouse that first week of proceedings would ever hear the words homosexual
or gay. "They used code words," reported the
Court TV correspondent. "They said 'lifestyle' instead." Defense
attorneys told potential jurors that "this is not a hate crime. This is
not about hate." The presiding judge
had the courthouse lawn cordoned into sectors. One was for gay demonstrators
who, as it turned out, never arrived.
Another was for parishioners from Reverend Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist
Church in Topeka, Kansas, who rarely
miss an opportunity to appear on national television waving placards that
reiterate the message on their Web site (www.godhatesfags.com)
that AIDS CURES FAGS.
Richmond is the husk of a once beautiful
and soulful old city. Most of its late neoclassical buildings are
oriented to the locks and canals of the broad
James River. Plainly its center was once a prosperous place. Just
as plainly something drew down the core population until the old buildings
fell empty and the grand department
stores on Broad and Grace streets were gradually shuttered. Now, in place
of fancy spring suits, the windows
of Miller & Rhoads, the town's largest emporium, are painted with
chalky murals depicting the city's
Bread Riots. Where shops with Art Moderne facades and marble bolection
moldings once sold whatever passed
in these parts for the latest fashions, there's now a place called Sixth
Street Marketplace, a shedlike multifloor
urban conversion whose retailing message is unyieldingly low-end.
Judging by the number of wig and barbershops
on Broad Street, it's a town that takes serious interest in things
tonsorial. But, of course, there's a subtext in all the barbershops, in
the shoe stores selling $18 pumps and
the emporia offering bargain mud cloth and frankincense. There is not
enough incense in the world to support
prime urban retail space; downtown Richmond is what a Southern city looks
like after 30 years of white flight.
That the people who filled in the vacancies left along Grace and Broad
streets would certainly have had no
place in downtown Richmond's glory days almost goes without saying.
There are three gay bars on Grace Street.
Each also operates, according to local liquor laws, as a restaurant.
The largest, Casablanca, has three high-ceilinged
rooms with wood booths and buttoned red vinyl stools and
ferns in wall planters and two mannequins in the windows dressed in Ray-Bans
and baseball caps to look "gay." There
is a wall-hung TV in the front room that, on the afternoon I visited,
was tuned to Pat Robertson's 700 Club.
Although I couldn't quite tell with the sound off what Robertson was saying,
superimposed over his image was a quote
from the prophet Isaiah: "They will bring your sons in their arms and
carry your daughters on their shoulders."
Until he was banned one night a year ago,
Casablanca was Eddie Northington's favorite bar. On that occasion
the six-foot-four-inch Northington apparently came on so persistently
to a local bodybuilder that, said a
patron who was there that evening, "the guy finally said, 'If you put
your hands on me one more time, I'm
gonna punch you out.' " Northington took offense. "You don't want to talk
to me, huh?" he said. Later that night
the same bodybuilder showed up at Fieldens, and, the eyewitness said,
"Eddie came in. As soon as Eddie came
in, whether he knew it was the same guy or not, he went right for him.
And the guy just decked him. It was
a movie punch. He punched his lights out."
When I mention this story to the bartender
at Casablanca, he says he's never heard it. He claims, in fact, to
have no memory of Northington at all. And
he hasn't heard about any protests or plans to demand that the
local police make some kind of accounting
of the murder. In fact, he says, his eyes flicking to the television
set, "We're just waiting to see what the authorities
say."
In their own way the authorities have been
sending a kind of election-year countermessage to the gay community
of Richmond. Late last year the police staged a series of busts in city
parks, among them the one where Northington's
head was discovered. They called it Operation Park Clean Up. The busts
specifically targeted men looking for
sex with other men. Since at least the late 19th century, according to
historian Allan Bérubé,
"urban campaigns against homosexual meeting places have developed as a
political strategy forattaining specific
goals: election to office, larger police budgets, and new laws." Their
success at preventing homosexuals–
or, for that matter, men having sex with men– from gathering in public
has been "at best short-lived," Bérubé
says.
The Richmond police raised the ante of their
campaign by mailing postcards to the 53 men they arrested, advising
them to get tested for AIDS. "As a result of your arrest on [date]," read
the cards, "the Richmond Police highly
recommends that you be tested for AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted
Diseases. Have your family tested also,
as your behavior may have put them at risk, too. Thank you."
Four of those caught in the sting hired
Richmond attorney Joseph McGrath to sue the Richmond police for
defamation. "The intent," said police spokesperson
Cynthia Price, "was that the spouse would see the postcard
and say . . . 'Why'd you get this? What's going on?' " But is that the
only intent? Or is it a "coordinated
effort to silence those who they think are in the gay community," as Shirley
Lesser, executive director of Virginians
for Justice, an advocacy group of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered
people, and people with HIV and AIDS,
suggests? "Richmond is filled with the walking wounded. They've so internalized
the homophobic surroundings they don't even
realize the oppression as what it is. Horrible things occur and
people are able to distance themselves. The
FBI won't say the Northington murder is a hate crime. The police
don't know. But when I heard that the head was placed in the same park
where the busts were, in the middle
of a walkway, my ears perked up. If you ask me, do I personally think
this was related to his sexuality? Yes.
How else can you explain such overkill?"
The word echoed again and again when people
described the reaction to Northington's murder. "They must of
was trying to make sure somebody saw that," says a woman in the local
tourism office, "with that kind of overkill."
Decapitation takes it to another level, says Dorothy Hamilton, director
of Daily Planet, a homeless center
near Richmond's waterfront. Hamilton had known Northington for three years.
Although unaware that he came from
a prominent family in Brodnax, a town of 400 in nearby Mecklenburg County;
that he'd served in the navy; that
he was a skilled musician; or that, until last year, he'd audited courses
in telecommunications at VCU, she is
quick to remark that Northington "was very polished. He was very intellectual.
He could hold a conversation with anyone."
Hamilton also knew that Northington was gay and that he was being medicated
for AIDS. "He picked up his medicine here."
Everyone knew Eddie Northington's story. He made no secret of
any of it.
Squeezing past an enormous man snoring in
a corner, Hamilton pulls up a chair in a cramped office at the
charity's Canal Street facility and says,
"It wasn't like he flaunted himself or went out for people. It was how
he carried himself. Not like he was
swish swish." If anything, Northington was unstereotypical: broad shouldered
and lanky, powerfully built and bullnecked,
he was, says Fieldens bartender Armstrong, "handsome in his own
way." He resembled a trucker. His last boyfriend, says Armstrong, was
a "redneck type of guy."
Northington was not someone, in other words,
that it would be easy to take physical advantage of, no Matthew
Shepard. "Whoever did that had to be strong," Hamilton says. "I don't
know if it's a homosexual or a hate
crime, but if homeless or gay people don't like you they just don't like
you, that's all. They don't behead you."
The killing took place at a section of riverbank
located between the Variation and Hollywood rapids, half a mile
below Mitchell's Gut. Scent dogs brought in
to track the body found no trace of blood on the ground. There
was some speculation that, after murdering
Northington, the killer cut off his head and then held it underwater
to drain out the blood. The headless corpse was discovered the next day
a mile downriver from James River Park.
Visiting the park one afternoon, I make
my way across the footbridge where Northington's remains were found.
I trot down the steps to the riverside park where, in better weather and
better times, the gay people of Richmond
have gone to enjoy themselves.
Picking my way through the muck and scrub
at the river's edge to a place where police believe that Northington
met his end, I find myself imagining the degree of premeditation it would
require to murder someone with such
baroque fury. Fully a tenth of the average human's body weight is located
above the shoulders: a bony mass of
skull and all the delicate, spongy complex tissue encased within. Heads
are heavy. It can't be easy to hack
one off and drain it, then haul the thing like a lunchpail through a dark
wood.
Although a soft rain is falling this late
afternoon, the sun breaks through the gray skies abruptly and lights up
the James River. The shallow water in a bankside
canal suddenly becomes a long pewter ribbon. It occurs to me
that hierarchies of worthlessness are deployed in order to render the
killing of Eddie Northington an anomaly,
another unsolvable episode in the ongoing Grand Guignol of the South.
That its context is plain for anyone
to see would hardly appear worth remarking. Yet the question comes up
again and again: Was Northington murdered
because he was gay? "The problem," says academic Chinn, "is that there's
no discursive space left for this guy.
What kind of way can we talk about him? How can you discuss his murder
and not say it's about him being gay? He was
gay. He was murdered."
The hollow ring of tautology that creeps
into conversation when people begin talking about specially categorized
hate crimes was nowhere to be heard at Northington's memorial. The service
was held at Richmond's Grace and Holy
Trinity Church. It was attended, say those who were there, by people from
communities in Richmond whose lives don't
often overlap. Speaking from the lectern, Northington's sister,
Deborah Clark, protested the fact that her
brother's life and death were being paraded around for the satisfaction
of those who "thrive on the grotesque." Eddie Northington had a saying,
she told mourners: "
'Live life! You only shoot through once."
Sure, Eddie had made mistakes in his life, Clark said. "But nobody
deserves something like this. People, wake
up! This could happen to you."
Research assistance: Lou Bardel
Tell us what you think. editor@villagevoice.com
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Posted by USA on March 22, 1999 at 07:28:24:
MSNBC, March 15, 1999
http://www.msnbc.com/local/WWBT/64037.asp
Police still baffled by beheading in City
Park
As the search continues for the suspect or
suspects in the be-heading
death at a Richmond park. Park-goers are
cautious.
39-year old Edward Northington was beheaded
two weeks ago in the James
River Park.
Police say there is no word yet on a motive
for the crime... But Angela
Jackson-Archer with the Parks and Recreation
Department said, park-goers
should not shy away. As always, they just
need to keep an eye out.
"When going into parks just like anything
else, just be aware and use
common sense. But I certainly hope this incident
won’t have people in a state
of paranoia, because I really don’t
think there’s anything for the general
public to be concerned about at this point,"
she said.
Most of the parks in all of the Richmond
area close at dark.
Many in the gay community say it may well
be a hate-crime. They say the
victim was known to frequent the city’s
"gay bars."
Police have offered few new details of their
investigation into a brutal
murder. But Richmond police did appear to
have a definite goal in mind Friday
when they invited news reporters in to discuss
the case of Henry Edward
"Eddie" Northington.
There’s been a lot of speculation that
this murder might have been a
"hate crime," and the level of
that speculation appears to be bothering
authorities.
They have not ruled-out the possibility that
Eddie Northington was the
victim of anti-gay bias, but police argue
it’s a big mistake to jump to that
conclusion.
"It could be any of a dozen motives
that could precipitate an event like
this," said Richmond Deputy Police Chief
Teresa Gooch.
High ranking officers of the Richmond Police
Department spent much of
Friday afternoon talking with reporters...down-playing
the idea that the
brutal murder of Eddie Northington was an
anti-gay hate crime.
"We are not at a point where we can
characterize this for any particular
motive…in any particular way. And I
realize that there are certainly, aspects
of this case that maybe lends its self to
going in that direction…but we’re
not there," Gooch said.
Northington’s severed head was found
on a James River Park footbridge
almost two weeks ago. Police said Friday,
that the murder occurred almost a
mile outside the park near railroad tracks
that run alongside the James River.
"We’ve very painstakingly going
through all of the physical evidence, and
there were dozens and dozens of items recovered
and have been submitted to the
state lab for examination," she said.
But police doubt they have found the murder
weapon among those dozens of
items recovered from the crime scene.
Police acknowledge they have received a preliminary
report from the
medical examiner’s office...but they
decline to release details.
What’s the early reaction from the gay
community about police down-
playing the "hate crime" angle?
Shirley Lesser of "Virginians For Justice," a
gay and lesbian rights organization, said
she is "skeptical" of the move.
From http://nz.com/NZ/Queer/OUT/news/1999_03/178.html
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