Crime Beat

semiautomatic rifle.
    “There is no doubt in my mind,” says Norwood, “that Jackson was going to spray me with that machine gun.”
    Jackson proved to be as talkative as Sean Doutre. He told police that he and Savage had been hired by Larry Gray, the ex-husband of Norwood’s girlfriend, to kill Norwood. And he added that Gray had contacted them through a classified ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine.
    T HE NEXT BREAK came on Feb. 5, when Sean Doutre was arrested again near Athens, Ga., simply because he had left a nearby motel without paying his long-distance phone bill. Once again, law officers listened raptly as Doutre gave details about Savage and the murder-for-hire business.
    Shortly afterward, ATF agent McGarrity decided to visit a former Savage associate named Ronald Emert, who had been jailed in Knoxville on drug charges. Emert turned out to be one more key to the puzzle. In exchange for not being charged in any murder-for-hire plot, he told McGarrity about the trip he had made to Florida with Doutre to collect money from a man named Spearman. He also told McGarrity to check with the Maryville police about a shotgun that was gathering dust in their evidence closet.
    Until that point, progress had been slow in Palm Beach County on the Spearman case. Robert Spearman had stopped cooperating with the sheriff’s department, and detectives were mostly waiting for a lucky break. It came after Emert’s conversation with McGarrity, who retrieved the shotgun from Maryville.
    Palm Beach detectives flew to Knoxville, and Emert picked Robert Spearman’s face out of a lineup of photographs. Investigators then began to check records of long-distance phone calls, hotels, car rentals and other business receipts gathered from Doutre and others in the Savage gang.
    Finally, the net was beginning to close. Law officers from West Palm Beach north to Minneapolis and west to Dallas gathered in Atlanta for a conference on the Savage gang. ATF designated it a national investigation.
    “It all sounded so wild and far-fetched—but it was all coming back as true,” recalls the ATF’s Tom Stokes.
    Law enforcement agencies began filing charges in the various conspiracies. Savage, Doutre, Jackson, Buckley and the others were jailed. So were many of the people who had hired them.
    Among them was Robert Spearman, who walked out of a store on North Lake Boulevard in West Palm Beach on April 4 to find Palm Beach County Sheriff Richard Wille waiting with a warrant charging him with his wife’s murder.
    T HE WANT-AD killers face a litany of murder, conspiracy and weapons charges in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota and Iowa.
    Last month, the chapter involving Anita Spearman ended with Richard Savage’s second-degree murder conviction in a West Palm Beach courtroom. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Earlier, Sean Doutre and Robert Spearman had been found guilty of first-degree murder.
    In the Doug Norwood attacks, Savage, Larry Gray, William Buckley and Dean DeLuca all pleaded guilty. Savage and Doutre have been charged in the Braun killing. The grenade attacks on Dana Free resulted in charges against Savage, Michael Wayne Jackson and Buckley. Buckley has also been charged in connection with the plane bomb in Dallas. Richard Lee Foster and Mary Alice Wolf have been convicted of conspiracies to hire the Savage gang.
    Charges in other cases are still pending. So far, the guns for hire are serving prison terms ranging from five years to life.
    M EANWHILE , the victims who escaped the gang’s deadly ineptitude are trying to return to normalcy—if that is possible.
    Doug Norwood says it isn’t.
    He completed law school this year and is now a prosecutor for Benton County in Arkansas. He sued Soldier of Fortune, claiming negligence on the magazine’s part in publishing the ad that led to attacks on him. He sought $4 million in damages but says he settled last month for an undisclosed amount of money. He still carries the .357 Magnum.
    “I take elaborate security measures,” he says. “I live in a Fort Knox. I just don’t allow strangers in to talk to me and I always answer the door with my gun. I’ll probably carry it until the day I die.”

EVIL UNTIL HE DIES
PORTRAIT OF A MURDER SUSPECT
Trail to Chatsworth Street is traced through the Criminal Justice System.
    LOS ANGELES TIMES
    October 18, 1987
    R OLAND COMTOIS knew the routine well.
    Arrested by Los Angeles police on suspicion of burglary, he hooked