Word: lawman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most days, Owyhee County Sheriff Tim Nettleton worries more about overladen beet trucks than he does about desperadoes. The slightest reminder, however, turns the Idaho lawman's thoughts back to the frigid January day six years ago, when a quiet trapper named Claude Dallas ruthlessly gunned down two game wardens, instantly creating the Legend of Claude Dallas, and a major migraine for the sheriff. One recent day, as cold winds whistled across the jackrabbit badlands and swirled outside his cramped office, Nettleton kindled yet another cigarette, propped his scuffed cowboy boots on the desk and pondered the renegade Dallas...
...avail. After attending a church lecture by an off-duty policeman on the dangers of drug abuse, the junior-high-school student knew what she had to do. Several hours later she searched her house, collecting the incriminating evidence. "The talk she heard the night before," said a lawman, "was the straw that broke the camel's back." Deanna's parents were charged with one count each of coke possession. Their daughter was placed in a shelter for abused and abandoned children...
Born in West Virginia, the 42-year-old lawman drove a tractor trailer for 17 years. He also had a country-music band in which his wife Gayle Lynne played bass. One night he watched a man get shot during a fight in front of the grandstand, and he "stopped raisin' hell" and turned to police work. Gayle Lynne said, "What're you gonna do? Save the world?" And he said, "No. If I can just save one person, it'll be worth it." He also gave up drinking and kicked his cigar habit...
Alec Wilkinson, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Midnights: A Year with the Wellfleet Police (1982), heard about Bunting and thought there might be a story in the lawman's exploits. Their first meeting got off to an edgy beginning. Because Wilkinson was from New York City, Bunting suspected him of being a Mafia hit man. But the Yankee journalist hung around long enough to win Bunting's confidence and come up with Moonshine, an intoxicating report on free and illicit spirits...
...Wiley was not a run-of-the-beat lawman. He aspired to be a poet (writing lines like "my love is a silver shadow") and had long worked on a mystery novel called Harvest Madness. Bigam knew that the chief had been moody lately, and a bit bored with the department he joined in 1978 and had run since 1982. Still, Bigam did not suspect suicide. Wiley's normally disheveled uniforms had been left at the dry cleaner. His apartment was spotless, and his manuscript for Harvest Madness was missing...