The Final Appeal of Paul Ferrell

[MegtheEgg86]

1. Ferrell's family's convenience store, now known as Gormania Gas & Go.

2. This screen cap demonstrates the distance over the river between the convenience store and the restaurant. The restaurant would be clearly visible from the floor above the store (where Paul and his brother and sister-in-law lived before Paul moved into the trailer in Mt Storm in January 1988).

3. Closer view of the level above the store, showing windows facing the Old Mill across the river.

4. Convenience store today.

5. Comparison screen cap from the segment.

[MegtheEgg86]

1. The turn-off for Bismarck Rd on U.S. 50, where Cathy Ford would have turned on 17 FEB 1988. Imagery isn't available for Bismarck Road; otherwise I would have explored it.

2. U.S. 50 looking west back toward Gormania, WV and Oakland, MD. The bridge crosses the Stony River, by which Cathy Ford's vehicle was found.

[MegtheEgg86]

Update: Received a reply from Mr. Yant this afternoon. Extremely nice and gracious man. He will be sending me a copy of the article he wrote after his investigation into this case. Really looking forward to reading and sharing it.

[TheCars1986]

Originally Posted by MegtheEgg86

Update: Received a reply from Mr. Yant this afternoon. Extremely nice and gracious man. He will be sending me a copy of the article he wrote after his investigation into this case. Really looking forward to reading and sharing it.

Cool! Can't wait to read it too.

And those pictures are great too. I wonder what Ferrell is up to these days.

[MegtheEgg86]

Originally Posted by TheCars1986

Cool! Can't wait to read it too.

And those pictures are great too. I wonder what Ferrell is up to these days.

Just received the articles from Mr. Yant today. He was kind enough to copy all 39 pages for me from the one copy of the publication he owns.

I'm still working through it, but by tomorrow I'll have read it all and will update accordingly. There is a LOT of information there not in any article I've read before nor in the Final Appeal episode. I'm actually pretty shocked FA didn't present some of the things Mr. Yant wrote about if the object was to make a solid case for Ferrell's innocence. I'll say right now that even if Ferrell was guilty, his trial and appeal were almost certainly rife with prosecutorial misconduct. The investigators were even worse.

Some interesting facts I can remember off the top of my head (I don't have the doc in front of me right now):

-Both Paul Ferrell and Cathy Ford are twins. Cathy has a fraternal twin brother and Paul's brother David--the one he lived with for a time above the store--is his identical twin.

-According to Paul, the first time he saw Cathy's Bronco was from the air--not on the ground. He was assisting in an aerial search by helicopter at the time and did spot a Bronco much like Cathy's near a few other abandoned vehicles in a sort of dump area near his trailer. He told no one at the time and apparently no one else noticed it either during this search.

-Darvin Moon and Paul Ferrell's exchange was a bit saltier than what was shown on FA. Moon told Ferrell he knew Cathy was "screwing someone" regularly out on Bismark Road, and told Ferrell that when he found him he was going to "get this", and showed him a submachine gun he had in his vehicle.

-There are multiple allegations of Darvin Moon and Cathy Ford both being involved in small-time drug sales and use--Moon more so than Cathy. Cathy was allegedly trying to remove herself from that situation around the time of her disappearance.

-The bowling alley employee who took all those calls the evening of 17 FEB was actually named and said that the woman sounded shaken up and refused to give her name. I'll elaborate on Paul's story on what Cathy Ford told him on the phone in the next post.

-The series of murders the prosecution said were "linked" to Ferrell at Yellowstone NP was unquestionably straight-up BS. Ferrell worked summers at the park between 1982 and 1984. During the periods of time he was actually there, only one homicide occurred, and the perpetrator of that crime was tried and convicted years before Cathy Ford went missing.


Mr. Yant told me the last time he talked to Paul Ferrell was last year, and that he was newly engaged and seemed to be doing very well.

More later!

[MegtheEgg86]

Ok, here we go. Get ready, this will take a while.

I have decided to mainly highlight pieces of information that either were not presented or extensively discussed in the FA episode rather than relay the entire article. If anyone would like the full articles, just shoot me a pm. Here is the first one. Emphasis is my own.

PROBE REVEALS MISCONDUCT BY PROSECUTORS, INVESTIGATORS

By Martin Yant
Copyright 1992, by Martin Yant


Two key witnesses who testified against Paul W. Ferrell during the 1989 trial that led to his conviction for the kidnapping and murder of a Maryland woman whose body has never been found say prosecutors intimidated them into giving false or misleading testimony.

...In an interview and later in a sworn deposition, the woman who testified that she heard pounding, a scream and a gunshot coming from Ferrell's Mt. Storm, W. Va. trailer on the day Catherine Denise Ford of Gorman disappeared said she was harassed by Garrett County, Md., District Attorney James Sherbin and Sheriff Van Evans until she signed a false statement implicating Ferrell.

Witness Kimberly Sue Nelson said she did so after being assured she wouldn't have to testify in court. When she was later subpoenaed, Nelson said, she was told that if she deviated from her signed statement she might be charged with perjury.

Mrs. Nelson's husband, Clarence "Sonny" Nelson, corroborated his wife's account in both an interview and a sworn deposition.

Tamela Kitzmiller, the other witness to recant, was one of two women who tentatively linked Ferrell to mysterious calls similar to one Ford allegedly received from an "undercover cop" who lured her to a clandestine meeting from which she never returned.

Kitzmiller said she actually had strong doubts about whether the man who called her was Ferrell, but that Sherbin and Grant Count, W. Va. Prosecutor Dennis DiBenedetto intimidated her into not expressing those misgivings. Kitzmiller said she has since compared Ferrell's and the caller's voices while under hypnosis and is now positive the caller was not Ferrell.

Mrs. Kitzmiller's husband, Gary, corroborated his wife's doubts and her fearful reaction to Sherbin's heavy-handed tactics. He said he will so testify in court, if necessary.

...Two prosecution witnesses say Sherbin also implied that the Ferrell family had "darker elements", and that Paul Ferrell's twin brother, David, who had re-entered the military to help pay for Paul's defense, was in a "funny farm."

Another prosecution witness says Evans apparently attempted to influence her testimony by leaving her alone with the results of Paul Ferrell's FBI polygraph exam facing her on a desk. The witness says she couldn't help but read the report, which concluded that Ferrell had been deceptive in several of his answers. Polygraph exam results are inadmissible in court because of their inaccuracy and are supposed to remain confidential.

Defense witnesses give even worse accounts of what they experienced before the trial. Three say they received anonymous phone calls threatening their lives and those of their children if they testified for Ferrell and endured other forms of harassment.

...Rose Ford, Cathy's mother, says that when she tried to tell Evans that she suspected the person who called Cathy Ford before she left the family's Gorman restaurant to meet the "undercover cop" was one of his own deputies, the sheriff laughed in her face.

Garrett County investigators failed to follow several potentially beneficial leads, including one in which a caller reported seeing two suspicious-acting females in a late-model Ford Bronco II bearing a license plated exactly the same as that on Ford's save for one missing digit the caller apparently couldn't remember. When Ford's burned-out Bronco II had been found in a wooded area near Ferrell's trailer eight days earlier, its license plates were missing.

...The transcript of one of several key interviews was not turned over to the defense until they were specifically requested last year by Ferrell's appeal attorney, Dan James of Keyser...Sections in which the potential suspect talks about matters that might prove disconcerting contain large gaps.

Investigators failed to interrogate any of several men other than Ferrell who had regular access to the phone from which he was alleged to have made calls similar to the one received by Ford. Two of those men had dated the only women whose calls could be linked to Ferrell's phone by long-distance records. A third had been reported to investigators as having been following one of those women.

DiBenedetto's contention that the mysterious calls tried to lure area women to two remote locations when Ferrell rented trailers there ignored reports mentioning other locations or the same locations when Ferrell didn't rent there. The recipient of one of those calls says the man who called her was definitely not Ferrell, with whom she has talked on the phone several times.

...After the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore and the U.S. Department of Justice's civil rights division in Washington declined to prosecute Ferrell because of insufficient evidence, FBI agent Everett Robinson III used the same affidavit submitted to federal authorities in support of a Grant County warrant for Ferrell's arrest. In the process, he crossed out, but left legible, evidence obtained with a federal grand jury subpoena and noted in the margin that a West Virginia subpoena would be needed to obtain the information. Such evidence normally is not to be shown to any non-federal authority without first obtaining a waiver from a federal judge. Robinson also misrepresented what at least one of those interviewed in the case actually said, and sought Ferrell's arrest for Ford's murder while admitting he didn't know how Ford died, "if she is deceased."

The testimony by an FBI polygraphist as an alleged body language expert, who interpreted a nod of Ferrell's head as an admission of guilt, was apparently the first time such testimony had been admitted in an American court of law. And Paul Ekman, a researcher on nonverbal communication at the University of California at San Francisco and the author of Telling Lies, hopes it will be the last.

...Ekman published the most recent study to discredit their expertise in the September issue of the American Psychologist. The results showed that of the 509 people he and Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of San Francisco tested for their ability to detect lies, federal polygraphists, like most others, were found to be wrong about half the time.

Of the seven groups tested, though, federal polygraphists had the lowest percentage of participants to score in the high-accuracy range. Even college students did better.

What's more, Ekman said, head nods are the most difficult of all body motions to interpret.

...Three of the witnesses would have testified that Ferrell had discussed replacing the trailer's bedroom carpet, which the prosecution contended was removed because of blood stains, before Ford disappeared.

Another was a blood expert who would have testified that "no meaningful comparison" could be made to link bloodstains found in Ferrell's trailer to Ford, as the prosecution contended. Her conclusion was independently verified by the head of the paternity-evaluation division of Roche Biomedical Laboratories.

...Ferrell's never-before-told story, and a disturbing examination of how he came to be proved guilty "beyond a reasonable doubt" of a kidnapping and murder that may never have been, follows.

[MegtheEgg86]

DISAPPEARANCE WAS A PHONE CALL AWAY

Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.
- 1 Corinthians 14:51

The phone rang shortly after 1 p.m. on Feb. 17, 1988. Pat Parker, whose shift had just started at the Ford family's Old Mill Restaurant in Gorman, Md., went to answer it.

But 19-year-old Cathy Ford, whose shift had just ended, got there first. The tall, attractive young woman with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and a magnetic personality seemed to be expecting the call. Before Ford walked out of earshot, Parker heard her a 3 p.m. meeting with a magistrate had been called off and that she could "be there."

The fact that Cathy's comments suggested a prearranged meeting would be the first of many details overlooked by investigators in the coming weeks.

The meeting with the "magistrate", on the other hand, apparently had just been arranged that morning during what later was termed a prank call similar to those other area women had received in recent months. Authorities said each cal had attempted to lure the attractive young women who received them to remote locations, although they never explained how a magistrate's office or a medical center could be called "remote."

Waitress Dottie Reall was busy putting salads in a chrome cabinet when Cathy received the "magistrate's" call. The exact time of the call is unclear. At the trial, Reall said the call was before lunch started at 11 a.m. But in her original statement, taken only two days after Cathy's disappearance, she said Cathy had answered the phone "after 11 a.m.--before noon." She now estimated the time of the call at about 11:15 a.m., a time to keep in mind.

"When she picked up the phone, I heard her say, 'My checks?'" Reall later testified. "And then I heard her say, 'Well, who is this?' And then I heard her say, '3 o'clock,' and she hung up the phone."

"Cathy, what's the matter?" Reall inquired.

"Oh, that just screws up my afternoon," she replied.

"Well, what's wrong?"

"That was the magistrate's office in Oakland. He wants to see me at 3 o'clock."

The fact that Cathy had said Oakland would later be greatly obscured. In fact, the word appears to be blocked out in Reall's unsigned statement taken by Garrett County Detective Donald W. Tucker. The emphasis, instead, would be put on Mount Storm, to which attempts were made to lure two other women that day.

But that meeting had apparently been canceled in a brief call Parker had heard Cathy answer a few minutes later--which would explain why Cathy told the latest caller that she could "be there."

When Cathy hung up, she took a long puff on her Marlboro, thoughtfully exhaled, and snuffed it out in an ashtray. She looked like she knew more than she was about let on.

"Who was that?" asked a curious Parker, who practically considered Cathy a second daughter.

"It was an undercover cop," an evasive Cathy replied. "If anyone comes in to buy beer, be sure to card them. They're sending someone young around, so if you don't know them, don't sell them any beer without asking for an ID. I've got to meet him to find out more."

"Where?" a skeptical Parker asked.

"I can't tell you."

"Who is this guy?" Parker probed, suspecting there was more to the story than Cathy was letting on. It wasn't uncommon for Cathy to receive such tips from a sheriff's deputy. It wasn't uncommon for her to secretly meet men when her possessive boyfriend wasn't around, either.

"I can't tell you," Cathy replied. "He said he'd get fired if I told anyone."

Ford left the restaurant and went to her apartment in a nearby house owned by her parents to change clothes. Cathy lived there with Darvin Moon, a fiery redheaded sawmill worker and admitted drug dealer.

...After showering, Cathy put on blue stone-washed jeans, a sparkling black underblouse, an open black blouse and black flats rather than her usual dress boots. Then she grabbed her black leather coat and pink purse, and returned to the restaurant. It was almost 2 p.m.

"How do I look?" she asked--a strange concern for someone going to see an "undercover cop".

"You look stupid," Parker replied as she looked at her out-of-character flats.

Parker had come to work already upset with Cathy because she had just found out Cathy had allowed her own teenage daughter to smoke in her apartment. Parker's suspicion that Cathy wasn't being up-front about the phone call only added to her irritation.

...As Cathy headed for the door, Parker asked her if she could at least say how long she would be gone.

"I'll be back in an hour," Cathy replied.

"Yeah, and what if you don't come back in an hour? What am I supposed to do then," replied Parker, whose skepticism was now bordering on sarcasm--a feeling, based on what was to follow, she now deeply regrets.

"Come look for me," Cathy replied with a touch of sarcasm of her own...

****

From Concern to Fear


It was no mystery, at first, to Cathy's boyfriend about where she probably was.

"She's with someone," Darvin Moon said suspiciously when Parker told him of Cathy's mysterious meeting when he stopped at the restaurant at 4 p.m. after a day's work at his family's sawmill.

As Parker filled Moon in on the details, Paul Ferrell, an off-duty rookie Grant County sheriff's deputy watched with curiousity as he waited at the main counter for a carryout hamburger.

Ferrell says he overheard Parker asking Moon if he knew where Cathy might have gone, but he didn't give the matter much thought. Ferrell had too many things on his mind.

For one thing, he was worried about his mother, who was undergoing a mammogram that day in Winchester, Va.

For another, he was concerned about the son of his live-in girlfriend, Cathy Bernard, whom she was to take to the doctor that day.

But Ferrell says he had another reason not to seem too interested in Cathy Ford's whereabouts: He had been seeing her secretly since the previous September.

And that was the last thing either he or Cathy ever wanted the mercurial Moon to suspect. Cathy said she feared Moon would kill her if he ever found out, Ferrell says.

Ferrell had gotten to know Cathy Ford during his almost-daily breakfasts at the homey Old Mill. Cathy was an outgoing, charming young woman who always went out of her way to talk to customers. And that, he says, is how things started.

"She seemed to be unhappy and feeling trapped, which was pretty much how I was feeling...I told her about how I felt like heading for Yellowstone Park, where I had worked several summers, and getting a permanent job. She said she felt like going with me. She really hadn't traveled anywhere, and had been tied down with the restaurant ever since she had graduated from high school. She was getting tired of getting up at 4 a.m., carrying the burden of the restaurant, the hassles of bad credit, things like that."

Ferrell claims they began meeting at the trailer he was renting on Wilson-Corona Rd. in Maryland at about the time Moon's drinking and drug abuse had gotten so bad that he eventually entered a rehabilitation clinic in Cumberland.

...Ferrell says the affair cooed down for a while after Moon returned in October.

[wiseguy182]

Wow. Thanks for all that info. I used to think Paul Ferrell was one of the few Final Appelants I was pretty sure was guilty, but that has definititely changed now to undetermined. I'd love to see Dateline or some show do an updated story on this, I'm sort of surprised they haven't. Unless Darvin Moon has used some of his poker money to bribe them into NOT doing the story.

[MegtheEgg86]

Originally Posted by wiseguy182

Wow. Thanks for all that info. I used to think Paul Ferrell was one of the few Final Appelants I was pretty sure was guilty, but that has definititely changed now to undetermined. I'd love to see Dateline or some show do an updated story on this, I'm sort of surprised they haven't. Unless Darvin Moon has used some of his poker money to bribe them into NOT doing the story.

I felt the exact same way and am also profoundly undecided. This is the crazy part, though: we're only on page 8 of the whole thing!

This case was all over TV back in the early '90s--apparently a Montel Williams episode and A Current Affair segment exist on it, so I'm surprised too that the case just seemed to kind of fade out from the public consciousness at large. It's pretty significant that the governor himself commuted Ferrell's sentence knowing he'd be eligible for parole immediately, and he apparently took a considerable amount of heat for it. I suppose he really believed what he was doing was simply the right thing to do.

Knowing the background on Darvin Moon, that scenario wouldn't be very shocking to me. It gets more interesting with him, too.

Off to work up the next section; will post it soon.

[MegtheEgg86]

Cathy: 'All he did was torture me.'



Just how joyous of a reunion that was is open to debate.

Moon later told investigators he and Ford had been getting along "great."

...Most family members and restaurant employees seemed to agree. But a few painted a much different picture. Some of the restaurant's employees and early-morning customers quoted Cathy as saying she feared Moon might kill her someday. She also told them she felt like running away at times, but she feared Darvin would only track her down.

Cathy even left behind some evidence to back up such claims in several letters.

"All me and Darv do is argue about stupid things and I don't know what to do," she wrote to a friend on Oct. 14, 1987. "When we were broke up, all he did was torture me. He would come to my house at 4 in the morning and get me all upset just to see me cry. We only got into one fistfight, though, thank God. He knew everything I did, who I did it with. So I thought the best thing to do was to go back with the son of a bitch, just maybe so I could live my life peacefully without being followed everywhere I went. He even had my phone tapped, he said."

...After Ferrell had left the Old Mill, Moon's suspicions began to change to fear.

"About 5 o'clock, I started getting worried...So I got in my car and went into Oakland and I drove all around and didn't see her anywhere. So I went to Mount Storm and drove through there and I didn't see her anywhere. So I came home and said, 'I'm going to report it.' This was about 8 o'clock, I guess, when I reported it. I called the sheriff's department."

The clean-cut, athletic, 32-year-old Ferrell, meanwhile, had headed for the family store a little more than stone's throw away across the rocky Potomac...

Ferrell says he ate his hamburger, did some minor chores and went down the unpaved street to his parents' house to await their return from the doctor's office.

When Joe and Bev Ferrell pulled into their driveway at 6 p.m., they say Paul was in the back yard throwing a ball for his dog to retrieve.

Paul came into the house with them and asked how the mammogram had gone. Fine, he was told. But it would be awhile before they would get the results.

After some more small talk, Paul returned to exercising his dog before heading for the bowling alley, and Joe and Bev went out for a light Ash Wednesday dinner of tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

The Ferrells were a close, Catholic, hard-working family that placed a premium on education.

...So it was natural that the seven Ferrell boys go to college, and all did. Only the twins, Paul and David, didn't earn at least a bachelor's degree.

The twins took life a lot easier. That was especially true of Paul, who was more content doing things like playing with his dog, lifting weights with his buddies in a room above the store or pursuing women.

Actually, the women pursued Paul as much as he pursued them. "I don't know how he did it," the more-serious David said. "I'd go for weeks without a date, and he always had two or three women on the line."

What set Paul apart, several of those women say, was his gentle nature in an area where men pride themselves in their tough exteriors.

But Paul's luck with women turned from good to bad in 1987, when he began seeing not one, but two women named Cathy.

It was also at this time, Ferrell admits, that he began making phone calls to bookstores and asking female employees to read a sex-related passage from The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book by and for women about how to keep healthy and achieve sexual fulfillment.

By the time Ferrell moved in with Bernard in December, he says, what had started out as a joke had gotten out of hand.

The calls eventually became such a source of embarrassment, Ferrell says, that he actually considered pleading guilty to murder just to save his family the shame of having details about the calls come out in court.

Ferrell says he also continued seeing the other Cathy--Cathy Ford--during this period.

"She was really confused at the time," Ferrell said of Ford. "She wanted out of everything--Darvin, drugs, the restaurant. But she said she knew too much for Darvin to ever let her go. She said the only way she could get away was to either blow the whistle on the drug operation Darvin was involved in, or have him done away with."

"I encouraged her to go to Cathy Bernard's brother, Doug Tressler, who was an undercover agent for the Garrett County Sheriff's Department. I told her he was so good he had even been written up in a national magazine [Woman's Day, March 5, 1985], and she could trust him."

But as Cathy mulled over that option, Ferrell says, she suddenly saw an opportunity as well.

"All of a sudden, she realized that if she brought down Darvin's operation, the field would be open for a new one...We had met at the trailer I had rented in Mount Storm and had planned to move into, and she started talking about using it as a base of operations. She talked about getting either Melvin Cullers or Gene Dove involved because of their tough reputations. And she said I could protect her, since I would probably be the only deputy on the Mountain when Hobert Schell retired."

Ferrell admits he didn't reject the idea out of hand. But since Ford talked mostly about getting out of drugs and not deeper into them, he says he didn't think she was really serious.

He found out otherwise on Feb. 17, 1988.

When Paul entered the Par-Matt Lanes in Oakland between 8:30 and 9 p.m. that night, manager Dennis Reams handed him a telephone message that would change Ferrell's life.

Reams had taken the message from a distraught-sounding young woman who had called for Ferrell a short time earlier. When he told her Ferrell hadn't arrived yet, Reams says the woman asked him to have Ferrell call her as soon as he arrived. She gave him a telephone number, but not a name.

Whoever the woman was, it couldn't have been Bernard. Bernard later testified that she had tried to reach Ferrell at Ferrell's Mart several times that day, but had stopped calling by 6 p.m., because she knew he normally would be on his way to the bowling alley by then.

Bernard made no mention of trying to call Ferrell after that...

[MegtheEgg86]

'Darvin's found out about us'



According to several witnesses, Ferrell then went to a pay phone in the entrance and made a call. Ferrell says Cathy Ford answered quickly when he did.

"I've got to see you," she said. "Darvin's found out about us, and we're in real trouble."

Ferrell froze. He was a lover, not a fighter. He hated confrontations, and always tried to avoid them. Now he was facing a big one.

Then, he says, Ford dropped a second bombshell.

"She told me she had picked up four ounces of cocaine and she had to get rid of it fast," Ferrell said. "She was slurring her words a lot, and I got the feeling she had already used some of it. She asked me to meet her at the trailer so we could talk and she could stash the coke. I told her I really didn't want to do that."

Instead, once he found out Ford was at a pay phone at a nearby store, Ferrell suggested they meet at the Southern High School parking lot.

...After Ferrell hung up, he returned to the counter and told Reams he wasn't going to be able to bowl in the league that night and would have to get a substitute. Once one was lined up, Ferrell says he headed for the parking lot.

"I waited for about 20 minutes, but Cathy never showed," he said. "So I decided to go home to Cathy Bernard."

When he arrived, Ferrell says, he was met with the full fury of a woman scorned.

"She was upset I hadn't called her about her kid and also because she had gotten a call from a woman who had left a message for me to meet her at the trailer instead," Ferrell said.

Bernard later told the FBI that she was indeed upset when Ferrell arrived because she "hadn't been able to reach him all day." But she mentioned nothing about a call from a woman.

...According to Ferrell, though, Bernard made such a fuss about the call, as well as his failure to inquire about her son's condition, that he decided not to go to the trailer that night.

"I didn't want Cathy [Bernard] more upset than she already was...I was also afraid Darvin might show up there, too, and I didn't want to face him."

..."All I did was toss and turn all night," Ferrell said. "Finally, I got up about 5 in the morning and went out to the trailer. I didn't see her Bronco, but I went inside to make sure Cathy wasn't there. She wasn't. Everything looked OK, except that the back door was open a little bit. But that wasn't all that unusual, because the latch didn't hold very well."

As he prepared to leave, though, Ferrell said he saw something in the field behind the trailer.

"It was foggy, so all I could tell was that there was some kind of vehicle there. The only reason I could tell was that there was a small amount of light--maybe the dome light or parking lights were on. I also smelled a little smoke, but I couldn't say where it was coming from."

Whatever it was, Ferrell didn't go find out.

Why?

"I was scared," Ferrell said.

...Ferrell was beginning to fear Ford's concern had been genuine and that something might have happened to her. Whether it was because of jealousy, drugs, or both, he didn't know. But he was worried enough that he called in sick to work that day.

He says he couldn't face pretending to be a deputy, a job he had quickly realized he wasn't cut out for anyway, with something so serious going on.

Moon perhaps unintentionally fed Ferrell's fears later that morning, when he drove up to Ferrell's Mart with Cathy's brother Gary.

"Is the one who's a deputy here?" he asked.

Store employee Sharon Aronholt says she called upstairs for Paul, and he came down.

Aronholt says she heard Moon say he wanted to report a missing vehicle as the two walked out onto the porch.

..."I know someone's been screwing Cathy out on Bismark Road, and I think something bad happened out there last night," Ferrell recalled Moon saying.

Whether Moon meant Ferrell in particular is unclear. But an already nervous Ferrell took it that way. So a short time later, Ferrell says, he went to the Old Mill to try to allay any suspicions Moon might have.

Moon was outside when he pulled up. He still looked angry.

"Look, Darvin, I just want you to know I don't want no trouble. I just want to help find Cathy," Ferrell said he told Moon.

"Well, I don't know for sure who's been screwing her, but whoever it is, he's going to get this," Ferrell said Moon replied.

Then, Ferrell, added, Moon reached into Gary Ford's truck and pulled out an Uzi or a similar semi-automatic weapon.

That, Ferrell says, just added to a growing sense of desperation that would cause him to begin covering up his involvement with Ford in ways that caused him to be wrongly convicted of her kidnapping and murder.

Can Ferrell be believed?

...Moon's version of events is unknown. He failed to respond to several requests for an interview.

As for Cathy's talks about bringing down Moon's regime and starting a new one in Paul's trailer and under his protection, we can take the words of Old Mill regular Melvin Cullers, who believes Ferrell is "guilty as hell."

Asked how he could be so sure, Cullers said: "You know, Cathy and I spent a lot of time talking before she disappeared...And Cathy kept telling me how some new cop was going to keep her out of trouble with drugs. So when she came up missing, I went over to Ferrell's store and checked him out. I could tell by how nervous he was that it had to be him."

Could that mean Cathy Ford had tried to recruit Cullers, as Ferrell says she had suggested she might?

Could it also explain how a jealous Darvin Moon had apparently caught onto the fact that Cathy Ford was seeing someone on Bismark Road?

Could it explain why Ferrell says--and Doug Tressler admits--that Tressler had called Ferrell a few days after Ford's disappearance to seek Ferrell's help investigating "drug activity" on Bismark Road that had a Garrett County connection?

...It's hard to say.

But sometimes the fact really can speak for themselves--or at least raise interesting questions.

The next article covers LOTS of different aspects of the case, including the quality of the initial investigation, elaboration on Darvin Moon and Cathy Ford's involvement in drugs, and Ferrell's discovery of the Bronco. I'll try to have it up tomorrow.

Also, at this point I just want to say that this entire document has been immensely humbling, and that is a good thing. I have made plenty of pretty fixed assumptions on this case without in reality having much information to go on at all. This report is challenging literally every single one of them, and again--that's a good thing.

[TheCars1986]

Wow thanks for taking the time to repost all of this stuff...it's very interesting!

I know there's more to come, and the articles do bring up a bunch of stuff left out by UM (no surprise), but I just can't get over the fact that Ferrell admitted to making those phone calls to the bookstores. If the guy really was a ladies man, why did he need to do that? Sure the phone calls mean zilch in the disappearance of Cathy Ford, but then again what are the odds that there was another "phantom caller" in that small town of Gorman?

[MegtheEgg86]

FALSE ASSUMPTIONS QUICKLY GIVE RISE TO FALSE CONCLUSIONS

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to fit theories instead of theories to fit evidence.
-Sherlock Holmes


By the time Cathy Ford was reported missing to the Garrett County Sheriff's Department at 8 p.m., members of the frantic Ford family and their friends had already begun scouring the area's winding back roads and logging trails looking for signs of Cathy or her Bronco.

By the next morning, they also began circulating fliers containing Cathy's photo and description. "Will give a $1,000 REWARD for anyone finding her," the flier said.

On Friday, Feb. 19, Garrett County Sheriff Van Evans personally took control of the investigation. And he never really relinquished it--even when it began to focus across the state line in West Virginia.

Most sheriffs won't allow a sheriff from the same state to cross their county line, let alone allow one to cross a state line. But Sheriff Larry Ours, in keeping with Grant County's general neglect of the Mountain, let Evans have free rein.

State's witnesses say Grant County Prosecutor Dennis DiBenedetto gave Garrett County District Attorney James Sherbin similar control until the trial. Many state's witnesses say they were coached in Sherbin's Oakland office, where Sherbin did the talking and DiBenedetto did the nodding.

Details of the probe were tightly controlled, and the true facts were selectively released. False rumors about Paul Ferrell's alleged perversions, his purported involvement in pornography, his purported homosexual activities with his twin brother and their friends were a different matter. They were freely dispensed--with a great deal of pleasure, many witnesses say--by Evans, Tucker, Sherbin, DiBenedetto and FBI Agent Everett Robinson III.

Of the three deputies Evans originally assigned to the case, the name of one, David Stoner, surfaces only once in the official report--and that was when a prank caller used his name.

Lt. Larry Gnegy, who wrote the official report of the investigation, said during a recent telephone interview that he "wasn't really involved that much in it."

"I was just more or less a minor figure," he added. "I conducted some interviews of the female subjects who were involved..I wasn't a principal investigator, and I more or less just took instructions from those in charge of the investigation and did whatever I was told."

***

'A question of trust'


The only deputy with any real involvement was Detective Donald W. Tucker, Evans' boyhood friend, and longtime subject, or victim, of almost as many rumors as Ferrell would become.

"It's well-known that Tucker can't be trusted," said a source with another law-enforcement agency.

The agent who eventually busted the Backbone Mountain Inn, more commonly known as the Bear's Den, which is owned by Moon's cousin, Mike Inglese, agreed.

"I avoided him as much as I could," he said. The agent had high praise for Evans, however. "Once he became aware of things, he was very gung-ho," he said.

Evans was gung-ho on the Ford case, too. He wasted no time jumping in--and jumping to conclusions.

Because Cathy Ford's early calls from a "magistrate" seemed similar to several prank calls reported by area women, Evans, Tucker, & Co. quickly assumed the third call she received was one as well.

But Pat Parker and Rose Ford weren't so sure.

Parker, for example, told Evans in a statement that she thought Cathy knew the caller "because of her and Darvin going up to the Bear's Den."

Evans didn't ask her to elaborate. If he had, Parker might have told him about the drug sales and usage she had seen there. She also might have told him Ford and Moon often seemed to get tips about the whereabouts of undercover agents to relay to the notorious bar, which didn't have a phone. The tips, the Old Mill's rumor mill had it, came from a deputy.

...Rose Ford did more than just hint about one deputy and the Bear's Den, but it didn't do her any better. She and her articulate sister, Anna Sutton, say that when they told Evans they wondered--probably incorrectly--if Detective Tucker might have made that final call to Cathy, he just laughed and shook his head.

Ironically, Moon himself indirectly raised the issue of Cathy receiving a call from Tucker when the detective interviewed him on Feb. 19. When Moon gave Tucker the name of a possible suspect (Moon never suggested Ferrell and reportedly defended him when he first became a suspect) and Tucker asked him if Ford would have trusted the man enough to meet with him, he replied:

"He could have told her any name. If he is the one that made all those other calls around, he could have told them that he was you, Donnie Tucker, or...anyone that wanted to give her some tips."

Whoever made the call, Parker still believe it came from someone directly connected with the Bear's Den--and that it probably had something to do with drugs. She also suspects it may not have been her first meeting with the caller, either.

"About a week before she disappeared, Cathy got dressed up after work and said she was going to town," Parker said. "But when I asked if I could go along, she became evasive and said she didn't know how long she was going to be gone. I didn't give it much thought then, but now I wonder if she wasn't going to the same lace that day that she did the day she disappeared."

But Rose Ford's and Pat Parker's suspicions were quickly brushed aside, even by the FBI.

"Every time I brought up drugs, I was told that was a separate issue, that Cathy's disappearance was sex-related, not drug-related," Parker said.

Yet Cathy's friend Melissa Miner, who lived in the same household with Cathy for the three years while Rich Ford was married to her mother, immediately thought drugs had something to do with it.

"My gut reaction was that she had gotten too deep into drugs," Miner said. "Darvin wasn't into coke when they started dating, but once he got into it, Cathy did too. And it didn't take long before they were into it bad."

"The last time I really spent any time with them was at a family reunion the summer before she disappeared. They took me into the woods and tried to get me to take some of the stuff and bragged about how much money they had spent on it. They seemed to think it was funny. But I don't think it ended up that way."

Another friend of Cathy's, who like Miner worked in the restaurant, said that Cathy was already using marijuana when the Fords moved to Gorman, and that she progressed into using cocaine after she and Moon started frequenting the Bear's Den.

[MegtheEgg86]

'Unsuspected suspects'


But Cathy's involvement in drugs wasn't the only lead given short shrift.

On Feb. 26, Jeff Trickett, who said he had been involved with Cathy until the previous August, told Gnegy he was "sure" Cathy had called him "right before she left."

"She called me a couple of times a week, and usually Dad answer the phone when I'm in bed--I work the third shift," Trickett said in a statement. "I let it ring once or twice, and he wasn't there, so I got up, and tried to get some pants on and stuff, and stumbled around and it ended up ringing about eight times. When I picked the phone up, there was no one there. It was just a little after 1. That's when she always called me, between 1 and 2."

Trickett was asked his whereabouts on Feb. 17, but the page on which his answer appears is somewhat curious. It was typed on a different typewriter, and lacked Gnegy's usual typographical errors. It also has a peculiar break in the middle of the following exchange:

Q. Do you recall where you would have been on that day?
A. I was home in bed.
Q. Did you work that week? What shift were you working?
A. Third shift.
Q. That would be the night shift?
A. Yeah, 10:30 to 7. I usually sleep in the afternoons, so there was no one home....

End of Taped Conversation.

Q. Are you aware of any domestic or family problems involving Cathy and her family?
A. No, not that I know of. When Darvin found out I was seeing Cathy, he didn't like it. Around June 1987, Darvin was confused and disturbed, and had some problems. he went away for a while and when he returned, he checked himself in a clinic at Cumberland. Since then he has straightened up. He's a little insecure. I would usually see Cathy in the afternoons, when I did see her.


Trickett's stated belief that Ford had been trying to reach him right before she disappeared, his admission that they apparently had secretly kept in contact after Ford went back with Moon and his statement that they had met in the afternoons when they dated apparently didn't arouse suspicion, however. The official report never mentions him again.

Another suspect never thoroughly investigated was the volatile Darvin Moon. Since roughly a third of all women murdered are killed by their husbands or boyfriends, they are usually considered a prime suspect by most law enforcement agencies.

Yet Gnegy later testified that, as far as he was concerned, Moon was never considered a suspect even though there was evidence he and Cathy weren't getting along as well as Moon said.

But Moon didn't act like a suspect, either. Although some of the Fords and their friends say his role in the search for Cathy was somewhat exaggerated by both Moon and the press, he at least appeared to be relentless in his pursuit and upset with local law enforcement's less intense effort.

When he expressed his frustration with what he viewed as local law enforcement's low level of concern about Cathy's disappearance to businessman Steve Dixon on Saturday, Feb. 20, Dixon talked Moon into calling the FBI.

"He called, but he wasn't very forceful about it...So later that day I called the FBI myself and got somebody in the Baltimore office. I think that's what got the balling rolling."...


'Jumping to conclusions'


...As word circulated that Cathy had disappeared after receiving a mysterious phone call that may not really have been all that mysterious to her, reports of similar calls to other women that may not really have been that similar quickly began to surface.

Once they did, they were immediately--and possibly incorrectly--linked. And what those who received the calls originally said in court sometimes changed just enough to tie the string of calls into a neat noose around Paul Ferrell's neck.

On the evening of Feb. 19, Evans interviewed Viola Knotts, who lived across the street from the just-opened Gormania Post Office on land adjacent to Ferrell's Mart.

"Viola stated that she received a call about 11:40 a.m. from a person she believed to be young and nervous. She also stated that he didn't seem real bright. [Descriptions of the caller's or callers' voice(s), intelligence and demeanor would vary immensely.] The caller asked if she lived near the post office. Yes, she replied, she did. She was then asked to take a message to Rose Bosley that her mail carrier was broke down between Bismark Road and Cherry Ridge Road. The caller then stated that if Rose couldn't make it, other arrangements would be made."

...Bosley didn't normally work Wednesdays. She was there only because she had agreed to fill in for a short while at an unspecified time so Postmaster Juanita Bosley could leave to make arrangments for the installation of a telephone and to cancel other utility services at the old facility.

But Bosley didn't respond to the call anyway. She knew Gormania's carrier routes extended only a mile and a half east of the post office--and Bismark Road was five miles beyond that. What was not brought out in the trial, however, was that Bosley was one of two among 11 local women to testify about receiving similar calls to also receive obscene phone calls from a man with a deep, masculine voice around the same time they received the other calls.

Bosley received the obscene call the same day. When she did, she began to suspect the calls were being made from the Ferell's Mart phone booth, so she immediately called the store and asked whichever Ferrell twin had answered the phone--she can't remember which--to see if anyone was in the booth outside.

Paul and David Ferrell say the were both at the store when Bosley called, and that David answered the phone. Whoever it was, Bosley says he sounded nothing like the obscene caller.

The second report of a prank phone call was made by Melvin Cullers, whose name surfaces throughout the report but never seems to have aroused suspicion. Of course, Cullers' name often arouses fear on the Mountain. His vanity license plate tells his profession--WELDER. But it doesn't tell his history, which includes the shooting death of a man under suspicious circumstances in 1986.

Cullers was acquitted of murder charges in 1987, but the suspicions remained. Cullers did little to dissuade them, either. He seems to enjoy and foster the image of a man to be feared.

Cullers even tried to intimidate this reporter during a rambling interview in downtown Bayard.

"Did you ever hunt deer?" he asked unexpectedly, as he stuck his face within an inch of mine.

"No," I replied.

"Well you can always see the fear in their eyes--just like you can in men."

But Cullers was just trying to be helpful--as he would throughout the investigation--when he called to tell Evans that he had heard that Sherry Arnold, then of Bayard, had received a call concerning a blue car on Bismark Road.

Cullers seemed to be particularly interested--or concerned--about the prank calls. So much so, in fact, that it was the only sensitive question brought up during a voluntary statement Cullers gave to Detective Tucker. The transcript was reluctantly turned over to Ferrell's appeals attorney, Dan James of Keyser, after he was told of its potential importance by this reporter. Although the statement appears to have gaps at crucial points, enough of it remains to show Tucker could hardly be accused of giving Cullers the third degree.

"Today is Feb. 25, 1988," Tucker started..."We're in the sheriff's office, with Sheriff Van Evans, Detective Larry Gnegy and myself, Sgt. Tucker. We're talking with Melvin Grant Cullers from Aurora, and Melvin, first of all, we'd like to know what you could tell us about Cathy Ford from Gormania, what you know about her."

"She's a hell of a nice kid," Cullers replied.

Cullers then went on to name just about everyone but himself as a potential suspect.

"If I wasn't sure of me, I wouldn't be here," he said.

Not once was Cullers pressed about his activities the day of Ford's disappearance.

Not once was he asked about why he seemed so interested if investigators had any "prime suspects" yet.

Not once was he asked about a report three days earlier that he had been acting in a "peculiar manner" while talking to some young women in Bayard--nor apparently would he be interviewed again when his name continued to come up during the course of the investigation.

[TheCars1986]

At least these articles have given insight into the alternate suspect Darvin Moon theory, as to how it was suspicious that Moon was the one who found the vehicle on Ferrell's property. Some have theorized that maybe Moon found out about their affair and killed Cathy and tried to frame Ferrell. But these articles hint at a different answer. When Moon showed up at Ferrell's family store to report Cathy's vehicle missing, he probably noticed Ferrell acting nervous or odd. Or (more likely), he simply heard the reports of someone seeing smoke near Ferrell's trailer and went to check it out. I do find the possible drug angle very interesting and look forward to reading more. I'm a bit confused as to motive as to why an agent investigating illegal drug sales would murder a possible informant, but I'm still looking forward to reading more.