Chapter Four
Pikeville, a fourth-class city and the seat of the Pike County, is located on US 23/460, one hundred seventy-two miles southeast of downtown Louisville. Originally called Piketon at its inception in 1825, it was named for Zebulon Pike, a U.S. Army explorer and discoverer of Pike’s Peak. The city is about nine miles long and half a mile wide. It runs through the mountains in the shape of a horseshoe and is, surprisingly, Kentucky’s third largest banking center. Unlike many eastern Kentucky mountain towns, Pikeville has a busy downtown filled with professional offices, a fair share of greasy-spoon restaurants, furniture and clothing stores, and crowded streets.
As the county seat, it plays host to many of the county’s estimated seventy-nine thousand residents during the work week, especially on the first of the month, when welfare checks arrive in the mail. On that day, city people see country folk coming down from the “hollers” in beat-up old vehicles with carloads of barefoot children. Pikevillians just shake their heads in anger and disgust, hateful of the “hillbilly” stereotype these people perpetuate. Pikevillians don’t understand why the hill people can’t become more civilized, why they can’t get jobs and work their way out of crippling poverty.
Most of the folks out in Pike county don’t have adequate housing and can’t afford decent clothes. They live in trailers stuck up against hillsides, and they walk around in clothes purchased second or third hand. At last count, there were eleven thousand mobile homes registered in Pike County. These are a luxury to many of the local folks, those who have to make do in old shacks made of plywood.
However, tucked away amid the poverty-ridden masses are a large number of coal-rich millionaires. Inside the Pikeville city limits, or within a ten-mile radius of town, live more than a hundred people with a net worth of a million dollars or more, making this area one of those with the largest concentration of millionaires in Kentucky. Many of these coal magnates are not snobs, although a handful do view themselves as rulers of a little kingdom while turning their backs on their neighbor’s problems and living in mansions.
Some of the wealthy wear overpriced, flashy jewelry and clothing, and often boast of having met the likes of President George Bush and the First Lady at high-priced political fund raisers. A number have had their pictures taken with more than one United States President, and they proudly display these photos in their offices and homes.
The disparity between rich and poor probably contributes to the local crime problem, the news being cluttered with reports of bank robberies, lootings, and slayings; of stories about men knifing each other in parking lots, drug dealers having shootouts, and people using Uzi machine guns and other assault weapons to enforce their own brand of mountain justice.
When Mark Putnam arrived in town to work with Daniel Brennan, the Special Agent in charge of Pikeville, allegedly he discovered that the area’s backwardness had filtered over into the FBI office. Brennan had been a special agent for fourteen years and was nearing retirement age. Rumor had it that he was more interested in his boat than in crime. Putnam learned this in the first few days on this assignment, and he soon realized he would have to handle more work than he thought tolerable.
Before Kathy arrived, Mark informed her in their telephone conversations that he was carrying much of the weight at the tiny outpost. He said he wasn’t sure he was ready to handle an office where he’d have such a heavy burden. It has been reported that he was scared, and fellow law enforcement workers believed Putnam was suffering from culture shock.
It must have been a great relief for him when Kathy arrived with Danielle in April of 1987. His wife seemed happy to be with him, and she liked the nearly new seven-room house they purchased in a subdivision called Cedar Gap. It was a charming place, just outside town and right around the corner from Special Agent Dan Brennan’s handsome brick house.
Modern, the Putnams’ home had large rooms and good-sized picture windows, a front porch with a wicker swing, pink azalea bushes in the yard, and a two-car garage. Their neighbors were college professors, lawyers, doctors; well-to-do professionals who had two or three cars in their driveways — BMWs, Mercedes, Range Rovers. Compared to the other houses on the street, the Putnams’ place was somewhat modest. It wasn’t elaborately landscaped and had no ornate gates.
Mark began to like the Pikeville area. Despite the poverty around him, the people in Cedar Gap were affluent, and he decided the post wasn’t so bad after all. Being a joiner and born leader, Mark did all he could to befriend his neighbors, to aid the local police forces, and to “fit in” with the Southern way of life.
But Kathy did not like her new environment. She felt she had nothing in common with anyone around her. The local twang got on her nerves, as did the greasy cooking and the beauty shops operating out of trailers. As far as Kathy was concerned, she had been sentenced to two years in exile; nevertheless, she resolved to make the best of it, at least for a while.
“Mark had the job he wanted, and I loved our house,” she later told reporters. “We were talking about how good this could be, because in a small office in a place like Pikeville, with everything that was going on, he could really make a name for himself.”
However, not long after Kathy settled in, the Putnams started spending little time together. Mark’s work kept him busy nights and weekends. He often worked twelve or fourteen hours straight. Determined to earn a name for himself in the community, he also spent many of his off hours away from home. He coached soccer at the local YMCA. He attended the St. Francis Catholic Church regularly — by himself. On Friday nights, he attended the Pikeville High School football games, going out for drinks with friends afterward. The local people liked him, which was, he told Kathy, crucial to his job. He had to befriend everybody in order to get the inside scoop on crime in the area.
Unfortunately, things were not going as well for Kathy. Now well along in her pregnancy with their second child, she was becoming increasingly irritated by her lonely existence. Unhappy most of the time, she paced the floors inside her home, attached to her parents and her Connecticut lifestyle only by telephone. To her, there were no decent restaurants in the area, no suitable movies ever were shown in town, and Pikeville had no satisfactory stores. With no theater, no museums, and no concerts, Kathy felt like a captive at the ends of the Earth. She would later say that Pikeville was like a wasteland.
“There was nothing there for me. The grocery store and the K Mart. That was it,” she complained. “I was used to civilization. You couldn’t even get in your car to drive. It was only a matter of time before you were caught in the mountains — and I was scared to death to drive in them.”
Worst of all for Kathy was the small-town mentality of the locals, the idea that everybody knew who she was and wanted to know what she was doing. On her third day in town, she said she went to the bank and the teller looked up and exclaimed, “Oh, you must be the FBI’s wife. How do you like your house on Honeysuckle?”
It was that kind of intrusion that Kathy disliked. She was a private person. That was why she and Mark had gotten along so well. She didn’t want people talking about her finances or poking their noses into her personal affairs.
She and Mark had kept to themselves ever since they’d met in 1982. They both shied away from gossip. Now, suddenly, she had neighbors who looked out their windows and sat on their porches, seemingly watching her every move. It was unbearable. She couldn’t believe these people had nothing better to do than wonder what was going on inside her home, inside her bedroom, inside her head. Their intrusiveness infuriated her.
Once, when Mark had been gone all night, meeting with his supervisor in Louisville, a neighbor knocked on the door the next morning and said, “I couldn’t help noticing that Mark’s car wasn’t in the driveway last night.” To Kathy, Pikeville was a fishbowl. Its residents ogled her, minded her business, and made up tales about her.
The local gossip and inquisitiveness of her neighbors only caused Kathy to become more and more withdrawn, and for the most part, she declined to talk to anyone except Mark and Danielle. For a while, she busied herself with her elaborate dollhouse creations, building wonderful lilliputian structures complete with tiny furnishings, which she took to the local strip malls for “showings.” But as the months went on and people continually seemed overly interested in Kathy’s personal life, she gave up her dollhouse hobby and refused to associate with anyone in the town.
It got to the point where she balked at picking Danielle up from the day-care center in which Mark had enrolled her. Not wanting to deal with the people there, she had Mark retrieve their daughter from the Model Daycare Center.
Danielle attended the center because Kathy ran back to Connecticut whenever she could. She often took Danielle with her, but because Mark missed his daughter, this day care became a necessity.
Of course, the people around her thought Kathy Putnam was unusual, and one of her neighbors, Mrs. Kathy Sohn, talked about Kathy Putnam’s peculiar behavior:
“I tried to reach out to her, you know. I brought a cake over there when they moved in. I did all the usual stuff. I invited them for dinner, but only Mark came over to eat. She never came to my home. Sometimes I would drop in on her, but she was always to herself. She was unhappy. That was apparent. The only thing she talked about was what she was preparing for Mark’s dinner. She’d be cooking some kind of meat and potatoes, just typical dishes, nothing gourmet, and she’d say she was getting the food ready for Mark just in case he came home early.”
According to Mrs. Sohn, the only time she was able to get any insight into Kathy Putnam was when she met her parents in 1987, during the Putnams’ first year in Pikeville. She said it was the only visit Mark Putnam’s in-laws made, and she recalled that Kathy seemed unusually friendly and perky while her parents were there. She had even talked about her dad helping her with some projects around the house, things Mark didn’t have time for, and she asked about painting the trim in the same dark gray color the Sohns had used. In the two years the Sohns and Putnams were neighbors, that was the only substantive conversation Mrs. Sohn ever had with Kathy.
Outside of Kathy’s parents, no out-of-town visitors came to the Putnams’ home, and because they had no mutual friends in Pikeville, and had not joined any of the local organizations or charity groups, they were isolated, locked away in the secrecy of their home. Even their daughter had few friends. It seems her mother did not encourage her to play with the neighborhood children.
Laura, the Sohns’ twelve-year-old daughter, went over to play with Danielle a number of times because she felt sorry for the lonely little three-year-old. Allegedly Kathy Putnam didn’t let Danielle out-of-doors much, so the child spent a great deal of time in her playroom. Whenever Laura came by for a brief visit, Danielle’s face would light up. Laura remembers Kathy as being distant and disinterested in her daughter’s playthings, and she recalls that Kathy was usually on the phone, talking to some member of her family or to a friend in Connecticut.
“Kathy was real quiet, she would never say much to me,” Laura said. “She wore black a lot, and she never went outside. It was strange. I never got to know her — I never even knew she was pregnant. Sometimes I would go over there with Dan Brennan’s daughter, Katie. The two of us would go and play with Danielle because she was hardly let outside. She was always happy to see us.”
Laura remembers Danielle’s play room, filled with every conceivable expensive toy which Danielle said her grandparents had bought her. Danielle would take out her newest Fisher-Price toy, or would show Laura the Putnam family photo albums, pictures of her parents’ wedding, pictures of her family trip to Disneyworld, things like that. Like most three year olds, Danielle liked to spend time musing over the photo albums, talking about her trips to Connecticut, or Florida. She would point to herself in these shots. From what Laura could gather, the photos indicated that Kathy’s parents owned a home in Connecticut and another in Florida. She got the impression that they were well set financially.
Mark, meanwhile, was gone from home often. When he wasn’t working, he went out with some of his acquaintances in town. He drank beer at the Boulevard, the local dance club where many of the patrons knew he was an FBI agent, of course never during working hours. After a football game or on a Saturday evening he’d drop into the club, however. Apparently he no longer worried about obliging Kathy.
While he couldn’t seem to get his wife to go out, Danielle was delighted to go on “dates” with him. Every Friday night, he and his daughter would get dressed up, even before a football game, and he would take her out to Coal Run Village, about seven miles away, where they would eat at a McDonald’s or Dairy Queen, then visit the pet store at the strip shopping center. It would always be just the two of them. Mark carried a picture of Danielle at all times, and would brag about his daughter to his fellow law enforcement workers, often telling local policemen how bright and delicate she was. It was a way to pass the time during the tedious hours spent on stakeouts.
In December of 1987, exactly nine months after Kathy moved to Pikeville, Mark, Jr., was born. Kathy went to Connecticut to give birth to the baby, staying with her parents for almost three months after the delivery. She refused to give birth in Pikeville. She had paid one visit to the local OBGYN, Dr. Harry Altman, and had been infuriated by the long time she’d spent in his waiting room. Used to preferential treatment, she couldn’t stand the idea that only one doctor serviced so many women, she offhandedly told Kathy Sohn.
During her absence, Mark got some extra days off from work in order to spend a few weekends with her, and at Christmas time, he took two weeks off to be with his young family in Connecticut, asking the Sohns to keep an eye on the house. Back in Pikeville, everyone thought he and Kathy were the perfect couple, well suited in looks and demeanor. Mark seemed a concerned and loving daddy and husband, Kathy a doting housewife who cooked from scratch and created a happy home. When little Mark took his first baby steps, Kathy called the state police and had them patch her through to Mark’s radio. When he got the patched-in call, he sped to her side, using his siren, Code 2.
Lee Deramus, who worked at Pikeville’s Model Daycare Center, had nothing but compliments for the whole family. She looked up to Putnam and was especially fond of his pretty little daughter.
“Danielle was very smart, a sweet child — very well adjusted. And Kathy was gorgeous. She had long dark hair. She was thin. She was classy and she dressed like a lady, although I never saw her much. Mark was the one who usually picked Danielle up,” Deramus recalled. “We called him the gorgeous FBI agent, you know, whenever he would come in to see what Danielle had been doing that day, what pictures she drew, and things like that. I thought he and his wife were a beautiful couple. Mark was always loving and caring. He had a smile on his face anytime you’d talk to him, and his daughter was that way, always loving and happy. You could see that she and her daddy loved each other.”
However, not everyone saw Mark as a loving father. His neighbor, Sohn, a psychology professor at Pikeville College, remembers a different Putnam. He can still visualize him driving to and from work every day, always keeping his eyes fixed on the road straight ahead. The Putnams each had a sedan-type vehicle: Mark’s was brown; Kathy’s was blue. And in a region filled with coal dust and dirty cars, Sohn recalls that Putnam’s immaculate brown car stood out. It was an unmarked four-door Dodge Diplomat, fully equipped with all the latest in hidden policy technology, and Putnam bragged about the car to Sohn, proud that the vehicle had been provided him compliments of the FBI. Sohn saw Mark as a kid striving to fit into a man’s boots.
“Whenever Mark passed my house, I would think he always looked much older than he was. He always looked serious, and he slouched forward over the steering wheel a bit,” Sohn remembered. “I thought the view of him in this ‘old man’s’ car was in sharp contrast to his youthful body and spirit. He always looked very proper and disciplined, but he was only in his twenties.”
According to Sohn, Mark was around the neighborhood often enough, but he seemed to leave home earlier and return later than most of the men on the street. Of course Sohn thought that was not unusual for a man in law enforcement. What he did find unusual was that the Putnams had very little furniture in their home. It seemed they didn’t plan to stay there long.
In Sohn’s estimation, Mark and Kathy Putnam had moved into a “manufactured” house, a two-story structure built very quickly, without much attention paid to detail or quality. Putnam brightened the place up with shrubbery and painted it a light gray, giving it a sophisticated look; however, inside the house, there was nothing to indicate a happy, well-adjusted lifestyle. There were no pictures on the walls, there were no collections of objects or books, no conversation pieces. The place was very stark, Sohn had noticed, much the way Putnam appeared to be when he was on his way to work, always wearing a starched white shirt and a sports coat. His coat barely covered his pistol. He was an all work and no play kind of guy when he was on the job, Sohn thought, the picture-perfect FBI man.
Sohn knew Putnam was an athlete, and the two young men occasionally went jogging together at the town track just minutes away from their street. Sohn recalls watching Putnam jog six or eight miles, sometimes taking off full tilt up a mile-long hill, then doing a set of very fast chin-ups, and finally running four-forties around the track. And whenever Putnam ran, he wore skimpy shorts and a tight shirt, showing off his muscular body.
At times Sohn thought Putnam a bit of a show-off, but he also knew him in a different light — as a fellow worshiper at Pikeville’s St. Francis Catholic Church. Still, Sohn never got close to Putnam, not even in the setting of the church, because Putnam always sat alone in the same pew, and did not stay after the service for the customary coffee-and-doughnuts social hour.
“I can see him kneeling in the center of the church, just to the right of the center of the pew. He wore a white shirt, open at the neck, no tie. You always knew his gun was under his coat. You just knew cause he kind of talked about it. It was important to him, that he was an agent,” Sohn said. “Father Hopinjohns, our priest, went to visit the Putnams at their home on many occasions. Father Hop went over there because he felt sorry for Kathy. He knew she was very lonely.”
On warm evenings, the people on Honeysuckle Drive would usually stand out on the street, watching their children play as they held friendly conversations. Sohn recalls the Putnams wore mostly shorts and white T-shirts with tennis shoes or flip-flops around the neighborhood. He was a laid-back guy who would stroll down the street with Danielle in a baby carriage. He became very much a part of the neighborhood scene.
But he also remembers that any time he talked with Putnam the conversation usually turned into a discussion about police work. It seems Putnam was forever boasting about his cases and the various leads he was following. He’d give Sohn all kinds of information regarding his FBI work, and that seemed strange to Sohn. “Shouldn’t FBI business be kept confidential?” he asked.
“I can remember in the 1988 Presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson was pushing his drug platform, and Putnam told me he was trying to develop a drug case in eastern Kentucky. He even named local sheriff’s deputies he said were a part of the problem. Putnam claimed he could get no help, no cooperation from them in solving the drug problem, because they were involved in it,” Sohn recollected. When he named names I thought the whole discussion a bit risky, but I listened because I figured any drug trafficking in town might someday affect my kids. I was concerned.”
Not that Putnam was a one-sided individual, all police talk. He was still a great athlete, and he wanted to be recognized as such. Mark coached the Sohns’ son in soccer, along with dozens of other kids, winning a lot of friends in the community; and eventually most people trusted and liked him. When the Sohns went way to Arizona for several months, Mark Putnam watched their house. They believed him to be honest and caring, and could think of no one better to trust with their key.
“Putnam wanted to help out. He wanted to be the big guy. He wanted to watch our house while we were gone, like a big protector,” Sohn said. “Funny thing was, when we returned he never gave our key back — he was too preoccupied — and then he moved without ever bothering to say goodbye. It was like he wanted to just forget all about us.”
In any case, it was the general perception that Mark Putnam was a man who wanted people’s respect, and he seemed to try to earn it by discussing his cases — the bank robberies, the stolen heavy equipment, the drug corruption. He liked people to think of him as a tough policy type.
And much to Putnam’s pleasure, from the moment he arrived in Pikeville, he had plenty of opportunities to fill the “big law enforcement” shoes. The area had recently been hit with a rash of bank robberies, and both Kentucky and West Virginia State Police had a number of leads and were in hot pursuit of the perpetrators. A lot of important investigative work had to be done by Putnam and his partner, Dan Brennan, because there seemed to be a pattern, which led police to believe that one robber was responsible for the majority of the robberies. The banks, located on both sides of the Kentucky and West Virginia state line, were all robbed in a similar fashion: the criminals used sawed-off shotguns, hid their identities by wearing ski masks, and escaped in stolen vehicles.
If Putnam could solve the bank-robbery problem, he thought he might land himself a transfer to an FBI office in some desirable location, one where he and Kathy could live happily together and raise their two kids in peace and harmony.
Susan Smith, by early 1987, was pacing around her house and asking herself, “What have I done?” she wondered why she had hitched herself to a guy her family considered a certifiable creep. She had stayed with Kenneth all these years and had been so unhappy. He played around. He beat her. He stole from her. Why didn’t she leave him, just take off? Did she lack guts?
But every time she questioned why she remained, she always came up with a defense for Kenneth, a way to make him seem all right. She would convince herself that he would change, that her family was too critical of him; would tell herself that he really wasn’t all bad, that he loved the children more than anything. And he was a good daddy, always bringing them home gifts and spending a lot of time with them. Brady and Miranda truly loved him. They looked up to their daddy.
But whenever Kenneth hit her or abused her verbally, Susan would go running to her sister, Shelby, for comfort, screaming about wanting out of the relationship.
“Why don’t you just throw that bum out of there?” Shelby would say.
“I know I should. I keep telling him if he doesn’t leave I will,” Susan would answer.
“But why the hell should you be the one to go? It’s your goddamn house, Suzie, not his! Now why don’t you just kick him the hell out!”
“But then what do I do about the kids? No, I’d have to be the one to leave, and then there’s Tennis in the guest room. Where would he go?”
“Why should you care about Tennis? He’s a grown man. Let him find his own place to live at. You don’t need to be feeding him and all those damn tramps he brings around. You’ve got to look out for your own self.”
But Susan never took Shelby’s advice. Instead she went on taking care of her children, her brother, her ex-husband, and any of his friends who might happen to need shelter or a meal. And whatever house repairs needed to be done, she did herself. If the gutters needed to be cleared, it was Susan who climbed to empty them. If a room needed painting, she bought tarps and brushes and handled the job, possibly with the help of another brother, Billy Joe. As far as household chores went, Susan did all of them.
So in June of 1987, when Cat Eyes came around asking to stay with Kenneth and Susan, offering to do odd jobs around the house in exchange for rent, Susan was happy to have him. She and Kenneth talked it over, and they were both in favor of the idea. Besides, Susan thought, having Cat Eyes there would curtail Kenneth’s downright nasty behavior and might keep him out of her hair. Plus, with Cat Eyes around, Kenneth wouldn’t have as much spare room for his other stray friends who appeared unannounced and uninvited every weekend.
Domestic life was just a cheap and convenient base of operation for drug-taking sessions and card games. Kenneth didn’t like to be controlled or regimented, but in Cat Eyes’ presence, perhaps he would be on “good behavior.”
So Cat Eyes lived with the Smiths for about four months, during which time he brought his girlfriend, Sherri Justice, to stay with him. Susan didn’t really know Sherri, but Cat Eyes had said she was having “problems” back in Virginia, so Susan agreed to let her stay with them at Vulcan in exchange for Sherri’s help with some of the household chores. Cat Eyes didn’t have any money at the time, but Susan didn’t really fret about that. She was always the kind of person who, if she had a piece of bread and you were hungry, would give you half of it. Susan never asked Cat Eyes for rent money, not even after it became clear that he had plenty of cash rolling in. She did, however, make sure that Cat Eyes supplied her with drugs.
Cat Eyes and Sherri stayed in the guest bedroom, located behind the kitchen at the back of the house. He kept his clothing in a green duffle bag, and in another bag, actually a pillowcase, he kept his guns and ski masks. He had two shotguns. One was a single barrel; the other was a double barrel, sawed-off. Cat Eyes was using the guns to pull off bank robberies, Susan was sure, but she had no proof.
He would appear one day with a wad of money, then he’d take off for a week. Then he’d reappear with a different car, then he’d be gone for ten days. There was just no keeping track of him. And Cat Eyes was sly enough not to brag about his criminal activities. He just let the rewards speak for themselves.
Meanwhile, Susan’s house was busier than ever, with her brother, Tennis, now using the living-room sofa as a bed, and her brother, Billy Joe, also hanging around using Cat Eyes’ room whenever Cat wasn’t around. Between the kids and the assorted live-ins, it was very hectic, but Susan didn’t complain. In fact, she liked all the activity, the different faces.
As a general rule, Tennis would bring home a new woman every weekend, and that in itself made life interesting. Being a handsome man, Tennis usually picked up flashy and attractive women, the type Susan liked. And her younger brother Billy Joe also brought around a few girlfriends. Susan made friends with these people and they all wound up purchasing drugs from her.
Meanwhile she maintained close contact with her family. Not a week went by that her parents didn’t stop by to see her, and her three sisters, all now married with children, also visited her frequently, spending countless hours talking about the trials and tribulations of domestic life over a cup of coffee.
Unfortunately, nobody really noticed the dark side of Susan’s life. They watched her take care of her children, cook their meals, and make do without much money; and everyone believed that she was managing just fine. No one knew the extent of her pent-up frustrations, or that she looked at her marriage as a failure, staying with Kenneth only because there was no one else to take his place.
As the children outgrew clothes and shoes, Susan began to feel the financial crunch more, and she started selling drugs more heavily, finding ways to hide whatever money she could from Kenneth. She became increasingly upset about being solely responsible for the children, while Kenneth just took any money brought in and gambled it away. She had, by mid 1987, lost all hope that Kenneth would change from being an uncaring, manipulative man into a loving husband and dutiful father.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Susan, she was under Mark Putnam’s surveillance. Her house was being carefully watched by the FBI and the West Virginia State Police as well as Pike County law enforcement. Pike County Deputy Burt Hatfield had reason to believe that Cat Eyes was the person responsible for the rash of recent bank robberies and that he was operating out of the Smith residence. He told Putnam, and the two of them routinely climbed the mountain above Susan’s house, peering down at her daily activities, trying to catch a glimpse of Cat Eyes. Eventually, Hatfield decided to arrange a meeting between Putnam and the Smiths to see if they might cooperate with the FBI.