Practice to Deceive

asked for the higher limits.
    And Judge Alan Hancock agreed. He sentenced Linda Miley to twenty-one years in prison.
    A sadder case was filed against a Whidbey Island teenager whose fifteen-year-old girlfriend disappeared suddenly. He finally admitted that he had killed her and buried her in his grandfather’s mulch pile. Her body had deteriorated so much that it was no longer possible to tell if she had been pregnant when she died.
    Like the “grotesques” in Sherwood Anderson’s classic novel, Winesburg, Ohio, Whidbey Island has its share of bizarre crimes, just as other small counties and towns across America, crimes that involve residents who heretofore seemed normal and harmless.
    Huey Ford, sixty-five, had one best friend: Mahlon “Lonnie” Gane Jr., fifty-five. They seemed an unlikely pair; Lonnie was black and mobile, and Huey was Caucasian and used a wheelchair, but they became truly close friends. Lonnie couldn’t do enough for Huey. He once drove Huey all the way to Louisiana and back so his disabled friend could visit his relatives and see once more where he had grown up.
    Such a friendship is hard to find, especially for lonely older men. But one summer, the two began to argue, and the arguments turned into a feud.
    Huey Ford was very proud of his lawn but it wasn’t looking good, bare and yellowing in many areas, and nothing like the green velvet perfection he had come to expect since Lonnie began helping him.
    Huey suspected that Lonnie was deliberately poisoning his grass, although he wouldn’t say why. He found that just downright mean. They fought for weeks as Huey accused and Lonnie denied. And the grass continued to look peckish.
    Because he was disabled and needed his wheelchair to get around, Huey Ford took extra precautions to protect himself; there was always a .38 hidden beneath one of his legs.
    One day in July 2005, Lonnie Gane went over to visit Huey in his house on Camano Island. He brought with him a .45 caliber handgun that he had borrowed earlier from Huey.
    They began to argue about the grass again, and Gane threw a pillow at Huey Ford who responded with a racial slur. It was so unlike both of them, but it escalated the fight.
    Huey pulled his .38 from its hiding place under his leg and fired two shots at his best friend’s legs. Lonnie made a grab for the .45 off a table where it rested, but Huey hit it out of his hand. Then Lonnie punched Huey in the face and knocked him out of his wheelchair onto the ground.
    The two longtime buddies rolled over and over on the ground. If they had taken a moment to think how ridiculous it was to get so angry over a patch of grass, they surely would have stopped, laughed, and shook hands.
    But they were both mad. Huey Ford managed to reach the .45 and gain control of it. He fired blindly but still managed to hit Lonnie in the back of his head.
    Even so, Lonnie continued to fight him, and Huey didn’t think he was hit. Huey fired again and his gun jammed. He could hear Lonnie gasping, “I’m dying—I’m dying. Let me go . . .”
    It should have been over at that point, but Huey reached for his .38 and shot Lonnie two more times.
    Lonnie Gane wasn’t moving any longer. Huey Ford reloaded his gun. He told Island County Detective Sue Quandt later that he did that because he intended to shoot himself afterward.
    But he changed his mind and called 911. He told them he had shot his friend. When EMTs arrived, they found that Lonnie was beyond saving.
    Huey Ford pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He died there in October 2011.
    “We never expected him to get out of prison,” Greg Banks said when he heard that Ford was dead. “But it happened sooner than we thought.”
    As the prosecuting attorney of Island County, Greg Banks had been to trial or overseen complicated plea bargains multiple times—but he had never seen a case as demanding as the investigation into Russ Douglas’s death in the silent woods.
    There was a plethora of circumstantial evidence, very little physical evidence, and virtually no clear motivation that sparked this Christmas homicide. Banks hoped that Peggy Sue Thomas’s trial would unearth some of the long-buried secrets behind Douglas’s death.
    * * *
    O NE MORE THORN IN Greg Banks’s side in 2011 was a local editor/reporter, Brian Kelly of the South Whidbey Record, who had obtained many of the sheriff’s follow-up reports. Under the Freedom of Information Act,