Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

around the Powers Creek Loop Road. But in the Marshall County Jail in Lacon, Illinois, on the eastern shore of the Illinois River, a prisoner wrestled with a burning conscience he hadn’t even known he had. He peered out the bars at the flatland shimmering in the heat of the August afternoon and in his imagination saw, instead, the old farmhouse and cherry orchards of Oregon. It was a strange thing; he’d made it clean away, and now his damned conscience was nagging him. He’d done it partly for revenge, partly because he wanted the little woman so much—and now the revenge had turned to ashes in his mouth and the woman was gone.
    In the intervening years since he’d pulled out of Oregon with Doris and the kids, Larry Light had come close to dying. Even though he was only in his early thirties, his heart had gone bad on him. Despite all the trouble he’d caused, the state of Illinois had paid for his open-heart surgery while he was in jail for parole violation. He felt somewhat better, but he still had to take heart medication all the time. He was suddenly aware of his own mortality, fearful of dying with a terrible burden on his soul. And here he was in jail again on a theft charge. He couldn’t even sleep. When he closed his eyes, he kept seeing George’s face the way it was at the last.
    Larry rattled the bars and called to Marshall County undersheriff Russ Crew: “I gotta talk to somebody in Oregon—Salem, Oregon.”
    Crew listened as the prisoner insisted. “Look, it’s about a murder out there. Believe me, they’ll be interested in what I have to say.”
    Crew and Sheriff Moe Berg questioned Light closely to see if he was up to something, but he kept insisting that he had to talk to Marion County sheriff’s detectives. The Marshall County lawmen put a long-distance call through to Salem and reached Captain Richard Bay. “This man says he killed his brother out there back about three or four years ago. Says he left him in the ground and that he’s probably still there.”
    Bay said he would check on men missing in Oregon, and on any records there for the Light brothers, promising to get back to Berg as soon as possible.
    But Richard Bay failed to locate any information on unidentified bodies matching the description of George Light, the purported victim, that had been found near Salem. That didn’t mean, though, that there wasn’t one still lying undiscovered. He passed the information on to Lieutenant Jim Byrnes, who was the chief of detectives in the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. Byrnes placed a conference call to Lacon, Illinois. Byrnes talked to Larry Light while Sheriff Berg listened in. Byrnes carefully advised Light of his rights under Miranda before he began to question him.
    Larry Light insisted that he had killed his brother, George, with a shotgun after an argument sometime early in 1971. “Then I buried him out in back of the house,” Larry blurted. “He’s about two feet down, wrapped in a blanket.”
    “When you shot him, was he facing you?” Byrnes asked.
    “He was facing me—then he turned. I shot him in the head—left ear.”
    “What type of gun?” Byrnes asked.
    “A sixteen-gauge shotgun.”
    Larry explained that he and Doris Mae, George’s wife, had covered George with a blanket as if he were asleep and waited until the next morning to bury him. “It only took about half an hour to bury him; the dirt was real loose. George shouldn’t be hard to find.”
    Byrnes jotted notes on the pad in front of him, as Larry gave specific directions to the body. He described a shed in the back of the farmhouse that was approximately ten by twenty feet. “George is next to the middle of the shed on the north side.”
    It was a most unusual confession for Jim Byrnes; the killer was thousands of miles away, only a disembodied voice on the other end of the phone line, but he spilled out information in a tumble of words like water bursting from a dam. Once started, he was unstoppable.
    “I’m curious. Why are you confessing this now after all this time?” Byrnes asked.
    “Because it was my brother I killed and I have had this on my mind for three years and I want to get it over with as it has bothered me.”
    Byrnes assured Larry Light that his crew would search the area he had described and that he would hear back from them as soon as they had something definite.
    Jim Byrnes called Marion County district attorney Gary Gortmaker and told him about the information that