Chapter 18
“A person doesn’t bleed as much as you would think.”
Todd Graves was a well-liked young man in his hometown of Collinsville, Alabama. His extended family was one of the oldest, largest and best known in town, and it included scores of aunts, uncles and cousins. Todd also had a wide-ranging circle of friends throughout the county, with a steady stream of visitors dropping by his house at all hours for parties and backyard barbecues. Todd was a husky, good-natured guy who happened to be an excellent cook, and he loved to feed and entertain his guests.
When the opportunity to sell a little marijuana on the side presented itself, the money-making prospect was just too great to turn down. Todd succumbed to the old-as-sin temptation of easy money, and his business began to grow.
Before long, Todd was handling a fairly large volume of product, and as in most small towns, word began to get around and the competition began to get jealous. Eventually, as with all get-rich-quick schemes, the bubble burst and Todd was arrested, the first time in his life that he ever had been in any sort of trouble. He was sentenced to the DeKalb County Jail after a conviction on marijuana-trafficking charges; he began serving his time in autumn 1999.
Todd had several friends among the ranks of the county deputies, including some from the Collinsville area who had known him all his life. On his first day in jail, he was made a trusty and was put to work as a cook. Jailhouse meals immediately took a drastic change for the better. The likable young man became as popular inside the jail as he was on the outside, and the deputies, jailers and inmates started looking forward to mealtimes. Instead of ordering out at lunchtime or going to one of the local restaurants, deputies on patrol often stopped by the jail to see what Todd was cooking that day.
Like the other inmates, Todd Graves heard all the commotion when Hayward Bissell was first brought to the county jail. Along with everyone else, Todd waded through the murky water standing on the floors when Bissell ripped out the pipes in his cell and flooded the jail, and he could hear the prisoner screaming obscenities all the way to his workstation in the jail kitchen. And he heard all the rumors and stories that circulated throughout the jail population, rumors that were even more lurid than the reality of Bissell’s crimes.
Despite his own size and his considerable ability to defend himself, Graves was just a bit on edge when he first began delivering meals to Bissell’s cell after the prisoner’s return from evaluation and treatment at Taylor Hardin. Although there had not been a single problem since then, those flooded floors, canceled family visits and shocking rumors remained vivid in everyone’s memory.
Todd Graves was, by nature, a very friendly and talkative fellow, and in spite of his uneasiness, he just couldn’t find it in himself to be rude to Bissell. He always spoke politely to the big, silent man when he brought meals around to the cells. At first, Bissell didn’t reply, but after a while, he began occasionally making small talk with the good-natured trusty whenever he came around.
In mid-May 2000, Todd Graves sent word to Investigator Mike James by way of his deputy friends that he had gotten hold of some information they might be able to use in the Bissell case. A few days later, an interview was arranged with Todd Graves, Mike James, Eddie Colbert and Johnny Bass. The men met in James’s office and Todd told them what he had learned from his talks with Bissell.
Bass began by asking Todd about a conversation he’d had with Bissell earlier that week.
“We went out on a yard call and they let him come out with us,” Todd said, “and when he came out, he made a beeline straight over there to me and started talking to me.”
“Why do you think he may have come to you?” Bass asked.
“I guess because I’ve served him meals and talked with him then, and he would talk about the food and stuff like that. He said that he liked the meals on Sundays and he likes the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we made and stuff like that. He just commented about how good some of the food was and some of it wasn’t.”
Bass asked Graves if Bissell was coherent and able to carry on a decent, logical conversation, and Graves said yes. Bass then asked Graves if he had seen inside Bissell’s cell, and what it looked like.
“Real clean, neat, everything in its place,” Graves answered. “He’s got a top bunk and keeps his stuff on it and it’s all in neat order and, you know, everything in its own little place.”
“What about his personal hygiene,” Bass asked, “does he brush his teeth?”
“He’s real clean, brushes his teeth, and everything,” Graves said, “and his clothes are real neat and clean.”
Bass asked about the day and time of the conversation in the exercise yard, and Graves told him it took place on Tuesday of that week around 6:00 P.M., and that Bissell commented on enjoying being outdoors in the pleasant weather, the sun and fresh air.
Bass asked if Bissell had ever had any kind of outburst with anyone while he was out on the yard, or if anyone else had any words with him, and Graves said no.
“He was fine about that,” Graves said. “They were shooting basketball and the ball came to him several times out there and he would grab it and throw it back to them and stuff, you know. He was just fine.”
Graves told the investigators he and Bissell talked for around an hour, and the conversation began with Bissell’s concerns about his car.
“He was wondering if he would be able to get the car back or not and talked about it being in the impound yard, and then he got to talking about where the murder happened in Georgia,” Graves said. “Then he talked about him leaving Ohio with her and about him killing her in the car, and just wondering [again] if he was going to be able to get his car back or not.”
Bissell told Graves he had been planning to go to Jacksonville, Florida, and claimed that his father worked there. He never referred to Patricia Booher by name, never called her his girlfriend, and didn’t mention her pregnancy, Graves said. Bissell also never mentioned hearing voices, being a Secret Service agent on a secret mission, and never claimed that a part of his mission was to terminate Patricia. He did, however, tell Graves several other details about the murder.
“Did he say that he killed her in the front seat of the car?” Bass asked.
“Yes. He didn’t say what he killed her with, but he was talking about having knives in his car. He called them toothpicks, and I said, ‘Yeah, Texas toothpicks.’ That’s a long, slender knife.”
“What did he say about the things that happened in Alabama?” Bass asked.
“He said that he wasn’t worried about that because his doctor told him that he was insane about what happened here in Alabama and his doctor is going to testify on his behalf on that. So he wasn’t worried about the charges here, but he was worried about the ones in Georgia because he said the murder happened in Georgia, in his car in Georgia. He was worried about whether that doctor could go to Georgia and testify on his behalf—being from Alabama like this—or if he would have to get another doctor, or something like that.”
Bass asked Graves if he thought Bissell had talked with his lawyer about the doctor’s testimony.
“He said he had, and that his lawyer told him that he had a paper where the doctor said he was insane and was going to testify on his behalf.”
“So, he was saying that’s how his defense is going to be, that he was insane?” Bass asked.
“Yes,” Graves said, “that’s basically what he said.”
“And he talked with you coherently about that defense? He didn’t hesitate about it or act like he was hearing some kind of voice telling him that or anything?”
“No, he was fine,” Graves said.
Colbert then asked Todd if he had any more information about Bissell’s knives.
“He was talking about him having a knife collection back home and he got rid of all of them but the ones that he had in his car with him,” Graves said. “He was talking about them being those toothpick knives and I collect knives, too, and I told him I had some Texas toothpicks and he said yeah, he said that’s what they were.”
“So, he was worried about getting the car and the knives back?” Colbert asked.
“Yeah, he was real worried about the car and the knives,” Graves said. “He really wasn’t too concerned about the other stuff, the way he talked. You know he said the murder was in Georgia. It happened in the front seat of his car in Georgia and he thought his car would probably have to go to Georgia because of that.”
The investigators asked Todd if Bissell had acted normally since he’d been having contact with him, and if he seemed to have a clear understanding of what was going on around him. Todd told them Bissell seemed to be fine, and that he had said he’d like to have a television in his cell, since he liked to watch TV occasionally. He also said he had seen Bissell reading newspapers and playing solitaire.
“So, he knows what’s going on in the world around him?” Bass asked.
Graves said he believed so, and said he and Bissell often had brief, general conversations when he brought meals around to the cells, but on the day in question they had talked in detail about the murder and his defense.
“And he talked about what his intentions were about claiming to be insane, or the doctor’s saying he was insane?” Bass asked.
“Yes,” Graves said, “he said he thought that’s what was going to get him out of this in Alabama and he was hoping that the same doctor, you know, could testify over there in Georgia and that the same thing would happen over there.”
The information Todd Graves was able to provide for the investigators painted a new and very valuable picture of Hayward Bissell’s mental state at the time of the murder and subsequent assaults. Details that Bissell previously had claimed remained cloudy in his memory were now being described to Graves during the yard calls with gruesome clarity. Some of Bissell’s casual remarks during their conversations were horrifying to Graves, and they burned themselves into his memory.
“I’ll never forget this one thing he said about killing the girl,” Graves said. “He was acting like he didn’t think killing her was any big deal, and he wasn’t worried about it. He said, ‘A woman gets killed every fifteen minutes in this country,’ just like it was nothing.”
For some time, Mike O’Dell’s belief had been that Bissell was, to a certain extent, manipulating his doctors by playing the well-learned role of a paranoid schizophrenic. He’d had years of practice, and countless medical and psychiatric professionals on which to hone his performance, O’Dell thought, but now he was beginning to tip his hand at last. Bissell’s jailhouse conversations with Graves and other prisoners about his crimes were drastically different from the carefully worded accounts he had given to the mental-health personnel and investigators he had talked to.
Todd Graves was very willing to help with the case in any way, and he began keeping precise, detailed notes on his increasingly frequent talks with Bissell. He always listened carefully, then returned to his bunk and wrote down each conversation as accurately as possible, with the date, time and place noted.
Only a few hours after his interview with Bass, Colbert and James, a group of inmates that included Bissell and Graves went on yard call from 6:00 to 7:00 P.M. and the two had time for another long and very productive chat. More and more details continued to emerge about Patricia Booher’s death and the hours leading up to it.
Bissell told Graves he initially got off the interstate to find a Western Union so his family could send him money to continue the trip to Florida. Then, he said, he drove across Georgia.
Bissell related how he stopped at a convenience store in Georgia, which he described as having two gas pumps with a blue gravel drive and a parking lot, also blue gravel, beside the store. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation was wrong about finding blood on the gravel, he told Graves, because he killed Patricia in the car and he didn’t believe any blood was spilled from the car.
Bissell also told Graves that Patricia was dead before he mutilated and dismembered her, and added that it was raining and that if any blood had gotten out of the car, it would have washed away.
“A person doesn’t bleed as much as you would think,” he said, shocking Graves. “She bled just enough to soak my hands good.”
Bissell went on to say he shouldn’t have gotten off the interstate. He went on a rampage, he said, and thought that he had gone only twenty to thirty minutes after killing Patricia when he stopped at the Pumphrey home in Mentone. Then he showed Graves the bite marks on his hand and arm that the Pumphreys’ dogs had made in their attempt to defend their owners.
“I got even with the dogs,” he said. “I cut one’s throat and then I cut the second one. Then the man got in my way, so I cut him, too, because he was in my way.”
Bissell told Graves that he had asked the doctor to take him off his pills because he wasn’t schizophrenic, so the doctor put him on Xanax and Prozac.
The conversation then turned to the knives that were in Bissell’s car, and then to Patricia’s family. Amazingly, he remarked that his girlfriend’s family was probably upset at him. But he had not met them, he said, and said he was a “little to blame” for her death. He told Graves he wanted to talk to him about the murder, and said it helped him to talk about it. At the end of yard call, when the inmates returned to their bunks, Graves carefully wrote down the conversation to the nearest of his recollection.
Graves had a chance to talk to Bissell again the following evening, and he pulled a metal folding chair up to the bars of the cell and sat in the hallway, listening as Hayward talked about what he expected the outcome of his case to be. Bissell speculated that he might get twenty years for murder.
Bissell told Graves he would accept a manslaughter charge, but not murder, and claimed he would get off on an insanity plea. If he had to do twenty years in prison, he said, he would be fifty-eight years old when he got out. He also talked about his two daughters, telling Graves that one of them was nine years old.
A few days later, Graves sent another note to investigators with more details about Patricia Booher’s murder. Bissell had told him during another yard call that when they were stopped at the convenience store, he was screaming at Patty and she was scared to talk to him.
“If she had said something to me, I wouldn’t have killed her,” he told Graves.
Bissell told Patty she was a double agent and a black witch, he said. Then he asked her, “Do you know where you are, Patty?”
She answered, “Georgia.”
That was the last word she said, Bissell told Graves. He then said that he reached in the backseat of the Town Car, got the knife and cut her throat. He repeated again that the last word Patricia ever spoke was “Georgia.”
Bissell told Graves that he had packed the knife to show to his father when they got to Florida. He started to leave it at home, he said, but wanted to show it to his father.
Graves also noticed that Bissell occasionally spoke to a few of the other inmates, and he, along with jailer Michael Toombs, enlisted them in the efforts to collect details of Bissell’s crimes for the investigators. Several of the men reported back to Todd and Toombs with valuable tidbits of information, which they passed along.
One man reported hearing Bissell say he killed Patricia in Georgia, and that his intention then was to kill someone and rob them. He said the dogs “messed it up.” He told the man he was irritated at the dogs, because he was going to finish dismembering Patricia and scatter her body parts up and down the interstate.
Another inmate said Bissell was bragging that the doctors had certified him as being crazy, and claimed he would do six years for his crimes and be back on the street.
Still, another man reported that Bissell acknowledged that Patty did not come on the trip with him on her own. He said he talked her into taking a ride, a nice overnight ride, and said she did not know she was going to Florida when she left her apartment with him that Saturday morning.
Bissell also told other inmates that when he ran Don Pirch down on the highway, he just wanted to keep Patricia’s body from being noticed. On stopping at the Pumphrey home, he said, he needed money. And he didn’t say “the voices” told him to.
Perhaps the most intelligent comment came from an inmate in a nearby cell, a man who was waiting to be transferred to the state prison for the murder of his wife and mother-in-law for insurance money. He had spent much of his time listening to what Bissell had to say, starting with his first night of screaming and cursing in jail, then after his return following evaluation and treatment. After analyzing and observing Bissell at close range for several months, the inmate stated, “This guy’s smart, not crazy.”
Graves continued to pull a metal folding chair up to the bars outside Bissell’s cell occasionally and sit in the hallway, talking to him for a while in the evenings. One night, during a thunderstorm, Graves was sitting in the hall next to the bars of Bissell’s cell when the power suddenly went out and the lights in the jail momentarily went dark. Prisoners began to shout and bang on the bars of their cells, but the loudest sound that echoed through the jail that night was the earsplitting screech of the metal chair against the cement floor as Graves hurriedly scooted back out of Bissell’s reach.
“I didn’t want to take any chances of him trying to grab me through the bars while it was dark,” Graves said. “You never know what somebody like that might do.”
A moment later, Graves said, Bissell began to scream.
“He was yelling, ‘Get out of the halls! Get out!’ It was enough to make your hair stand up, the way he was hollering,” Graves said. “But he did that sometimes at night; he’d be talking to the Lord one minute and the Devil the next.”
With the exception of his single marijuana-trafficking conviction, Todd Graves had always been a young man who tried to do the right thing. He had a mother and twin sisters, whom he loved dearly, and it wasn’t easy for him to sit and listen, trying not to react, while Bissell described his horrific mutilation of Patricia Booher. It could have been his own brother or father instead of Don Pirch on that road in Mentone, or his beloved grandparents instead of the Pumphreys who might have looked out their front windows to see Bissell walking up their driveway with a long knife in his hand. Todd couldn’t keep from being very ill at ease while he was spending time talking with Bissell, but he was determined to do his best to help. He did whatever he could to aid the deputies and investigators; after all, it was the right thing to do.
The information Todd reported to the investigators and the tips that he helped to collect from other inmates provided a great deal of validation for O’Dell’s theory about Bissell’s alleged mental state at the time of his crimes. And, like Mike O’Dell, Mike James, Eddie Colbert and Johnny Bass, Todd Graves believed that Hayward Bissell was crazy like a fox, attempting to use his long-documented mental problems to get himself out of trouble.