After my father was murdered in 1973, I spent decades looking for the man who killed him. What I found changed everything Id believed about him and the life he lived.”>
ST. LOUIS Just before daybreak, sitting at the edge of her bed in an upper bedroom, she clutched her pale blue housecoat and listened tearfully to the transistor radio on the nightstand. At the top of the hour, a familiar, melodic voice confirmed what she already knew: Her husband was dead.
It had been a tumultuous relationship, at times beautiful and at others marred with ugliness. They were separated and had been for several years, living worlds apart and with other people now, but he was still hersstill her husband and the father of her youngest child. The news that he had been murderedfound shot in the head and pronounced dead on arrival at a city-run hospital was devastating.
Shed gotten the fateful call from nightclub owner Gene Normanwho doubled as a disc jockey on KATZ-AM 1600as she closed her shift as a cocktail waitress at The Windjammer. She left the bar, situated atop the Marriott Hotel near Lambert Field, and began the 20-mile drive home east along Interstate 70. As she crossed the Mississippi River into East St. Louis, Norman took to the airwaves and dedicated a songGladys Knights Midnight Train to Georgiato Jerry.
he couldnt make it,
so hes leaving the life hes come to know
It was still dark out when she pulled into the public housing complex in the Duck Hill neighborhood. She wailed, screaming and shaking in her car.
Id rather live in his world,
than live without him in mine
I watched my mother descend the stairs that Sunday morning. Overcome with grief, her voice breaking and her body still trembling, she reached for me. Hes gone, she whispered, grabbing me with both hands. Your daddy was killed.
He kept dreaming,
That someday hed be a star
But he sure found out the hard way,
That dreams dont always come true
With stops and starts, I have spent decades looking for answers, slowly and methodically stitching together the fabric of a story no one would talk about. New questions and new answers have emerged over the years as I chased down a faceless killer. But, in the end, I came up shortunable to answer the driving question: Who murdered my father?
My search ended where it had begun: With a man named Roland B. Norton, Jr.
***
Roland was a desperate mandesperate to survive the violent drug war brewing in north St. Louis and desperate to stay out of prison. Charged with two counts of dealing heroin, Norton was quickly released on bond and hit the street with one end in mind: find the government informant threatening his freedom and kill him.
In the weeks leading up to his November 1973 federal drug trafficking trial, two men were shot, in separate incidents, execution-style. The second man, Wyart Taylor, was my father. He was found, blocks from his house in north St. Louis, face down on a sidewalk in a pool of blood.
A grand jury indictmentannounced by Donald J. Stohr, the U.S. district attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri in the fall of 1973spelled out the damning case against Norton, who was suspected of having connections to at least two notorious drug rings that kept north St. Louis awash in brown sugar and snow. On August 10 of that year, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that 24-year-old Nortonwho was then employed as an auditor in the city license collectors officeand another man named Bernard Pratt were allegedly part of a large-scale narcotics sales operation.
Secured in March, the Norton indictment had been sealed for nearly six months to protect the identity of a federal witness and the integrity of other ongoing investigations. However, once Norton was arrested that August, the document became public and Norton immediately launched a city-wide manhunt for the witness.
Eager to unmask the unnamed informant, Nortons defense attorneys filed a bill of particulars on September 6, demanding that the government furnish him with the time, place, and name of the party, if there is any, who are witnesses to the transactions. They also moved to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that the delay had prejudiced his ability to present an effective defense, thereby violating his Fifth Amendment right to due process.
The judge in the case, John F. Nagle, denied both motions, leaving Norton to guess who was cooperating with the FBI and DEA.
According to court records, there were two transactions on or about February 26 of that yearone for $350, the other for $500, together weighing 3.9 gramsand, based on that information, Norton figured out who set him up. Just over a month after the indictment was unsealed and the defendant was released on bond from federal custody, Michael Big Mike Jones was tracked down and killed on September 17. Although he was not among the listed witnesses and had no known drug involvement, the second man my father Wyartwas murdered on November 5 as he walked home from an illicit card game.
Nortonthe son of a disgraced St. Louis police officerwas never charged in the murders, nor is there any evidence that he was an official suspect in either shooting. According to Grandma Cat, local authorities quickly wrote off both as robberies gone bad and she said the investigations were summarily closed. When she went downtown to police headquarters to offer a cash reward for information about her sons murder, the desk sergeant allegedly told her, Go home, lady. Nobody cares who killed your boy.
But the streets were whispering about the likelihood that Norton, also a reputed pimp who was said to be fond of fine clothes, flashy jewelry and beautiful women, was involved. Before his arrest on federal drug trafficking charges, Norton enjoyed the high lifereplete with full-length fur coats, silk-ribboned wide brimmed hats, and scantily-clad, cooing cocktail waitresses who answered at his beckoning. Despite those trappings, and a well-paying city job secured with his fathers connections, he frequently borrowed money from a local loan shark named Papa Joe Henry.
The younger Norton also relied heavily on his father, with whom he still lived in the 4500 block of McMillan Avenue at the time of his indictment.
From the first time I overheard his name in the early 1980s, I was told Norton was the son of a Korean War veteran and dirty cop said to have taken bribes to protect area drug dealers and underground night clubs, and to have fed police information to Italian mobsters. How much of what my older cousins said was fact or folly, I did not know. However, some of that information was confirmed recently when I learned that Norton, Sr. had been brought up on decidedly thin charges of public corruption and demoted by the St. Louis police department in 1959, after just three years on the force. He resigned five years after that, amid a second investigation into allegations of wrongdoing and after hed allegedly been seen frequenting a tavern of ill-repute as an off-duty officer.
The formal charge cited specific instances that he was alleged to have collected admittance fees, removed objectionable customers and closed the doors at closing hours. He had also associated with a woman wanted for burglary. Two years later, in 1966, Norton Sr. was shot in the leg during an altercation over a strip tease dancer. Tragically, his wife Ellyn was killed along with two others in a 1970 car accident on Illinois Route 127, just north of Greenville, Illinois, after another vehicle crossed the centerline and struck them head-on.
By 1973, Norton, Sr. was a widower living on his military pension who did not have the means to make his sons five-figure bail. A few months ago, I tracked down a woman, a family acquaintance who had been the live-in girlfriend of a rival drug lord. She hesitantly told me that a pair of Nortons mid-level drug captains posted the $50,000 cash bond. I was unable to find a trace of either man in public records, but she said they were looking after their own interests. The drug-runners needed Norton out of jail, away from federal agents and potential jailhouse informants. They need Norton to handle that business, the ex-girlfriend told me.
The government witness needed to be found and silenced.
When he was first taken into custody, investigators reportedly pressured Norton about his ties to drug gangs operating in St. Louisincluding the notorious Petty Brothersand offered him a deal that included immunity, but no federal protection. Norton refused to tell FBI and DEA agents who he was working for. Roland aint wanna die, the rivals ex-girlfriend said, and he damn sure aint wanna to go to jail.
Norton had few real options and, the way he saw it, there was just one way out. He knew who made the buys from him based on the dates and amounts listed in the indictment. Prosecutors believed by sealing the indictment against Norton they were buying time to make headway in breaking up a suspected ring of high-end dealers and put an end to the bloodshed. The document, unsealed by federal law upon Nortons arrest, might as well have been a death warrant.
Big Mike was a dead man walking, an older female cousin told me.
Described by my cousin as a large flamboyant gay man, Big Mike was making a decent living setting up dealers for the federal investigators. He was a small-time hustler, she said, and court records confirm that Jones was actively helping in several cases.
Bodies were dropping every other day, my cousin, who was once engaged to one of St. Louis most notorious crime bosses, told me.
Feweven my cousinwould talk with me on the record without anonymity about the drug war that was touched off in the early 70s and lasted into the early 80s. Almost no one wanted to talk about the violencewhich included car bombings and movie-theater shootingsthat littered the nightly newscasts.
But Dennis Haymona former drug kingpin himself who led one of the areas deadliest gangs knew both Norton and Jones well. My cousin told me about Haymon and I quickly found him still living in St. Louis.
Haymon remembers that Big Mike was a drug addict who knew how to get money. Jones, he said, was also a well-known booster and a money-getter who peddled stolen goods around the corner of Pendleton and Finney Avenues.
Despite his legal predicament, Norton wasnt a real killer, Haymon, who was once one of the most feared men to walk the streets of St. Louis, told me over a series of phone calls spanning hours in recent months. Now an ordained minister and an anti-gang activist writing his memoirs, Haymon served 25 years of a life sentence after he was convicted on murder charges in 1979.
Haymon confirmed what Id read in old newspaper clips, that he had been locked in a bloody war with the Petty BrothersSamuel, Lorenzo, and Josephfor nearly a decade. In one incident, he said the Pettys climbed atop a nightclub and sprayed a crowd with bullets in a failed attempt to kill him. Five club-goers were shot and a woman standing five feet from Haymon was killed in the incident, but Haymon got away.
My family had been close to the Pettys when I was growing up. As a child, I had been fond of Joewho was engaged to my cousin and fathered two of her now grown daughters. He was a good-looking man with wide, nickel-sized eyes and a full beard. I remember how he had always been especially kind to me, even helping me land my first job at 14 as a dining-room attendant in a downtown St. Louis restaurant that was reputedly run by the mob.
Joe, who died after a suspicious motorcycle accident the following year, used to tell me how much I looked like my father. If he knew what happened to him, he never said and that secret was buried with him. But, in so many ways, Joe had been my protector. A once stern music teacher in junior high school suddenly treated me more gently after she learned that I had family ties to Joe. I never met his brother Sam, an ex-convict who was sent away of federal drug trafficking charges and died of bone cancer in the 1990s.
But recently, I contacted Lorenzothe only surviving brotherafter cajoling a mutual acquaintance for his cell number. Though I had never actually met Lorenzo, I had always been told that he was an evil man. His first arrest came in 1964, at just 15 years old, when Lorenzo stabbed 21-year-old Leroy Chappel over 25 cents.
Lorenzo is one mean dude, and just about everybody is scared to death of him, a detective said after he was arrested in 1978. Maybe, just maybe with him being locked up, things will cool down. A search warrant for his Northwoods house turned up sticks of dynamite, assault rifles, ammunition and a bullet-proof vest.
My fingers twitched as I dialed the number. I stammered, at first, then told him why I was calling.
I cant help you with that, Lorenzo said, repeatedly, as I peppered him with questions about Roland Norton, Jr. and Big Mike Jones. He hung up at the mere mention of my fathers name.
If the Petty Brothers knew what happened to Big Mike or my father, those secrets will almost certainly die with the last of them. I phoned Haymon again, pressing him for more details.
Roland was soft, Haymonthe only person willing to talk on the record with his name attachedsaid of Big Mikes murder. He had problems pulling the trigger.
A second, unidentified man supposedly took the pistol from Norton and finished the job.
But even with Big Mike dead, there remained at least one potential witness to testify against Nortonone of his closest associates, in whom he confided nearly everything and to whom, a source said, Norton purportedly owed a piece of money.
Seven weeks after Big Mike was killed, minutes after a resident on Kossuth Avenue called police to report shouting and gunshots, a 30-year-old man was discovered face down on the sidewalk. The victim had been shot four times in the head, at close range, with a .22 caliber pistol. Three rounds were still lodged in his brain. The last blast entered his left temple and exited the right side of his face.
Die nigger. Nigger, die quick, the gunman reportedly said, according to the St. Louis Daily Whirl, a notorious local crime tabloid.
Given the circumstances and the coroners report, I thought it had to be more than a robbery gone bad, as my grandmother had been told. Everything I knew about my fathers killingfour bullets to the head at close-range and the words allegedly said as he lay dying suggested it was personal. The shooting reeked of vengeance and malice. And the more I learned about Norton and his connections to St. Louis underworld, the more convinced I became that my fathers association with Norton had cost him his life.
How much did my father actually know about Roland Nortons dealings? Was he one of the governments witnesses in the federal drug case? Was he in-league with the drug gangs that ruled the streets of St. Louis? And, perhaps more critically, was my father the trigger man in the murder Big Mike Jones?
Candidly, there were moments when I did not want to know the truth. Over four decades later, I know that most of those questions will go unanswered. To find some of them, I had to search the annals of my own family history.
***
Florence Blackard (nee Carroll) was a drug-addled prostitute. In the mid-1930s, my great grandmother was penniless and estranged from her husband Murray when she was forced to give up her two daughters after child services intervened. The timid, malnourished girlsmarked with old scars, mended bone fractures and fresh bruiseswere led from the rodent-infested apartment on Pine Street that had no running water or electricity.
A busted radiator, situated near a sheet-covered window overlooking the avenue below, emitted no heat. The bone-cold, three-room unit was festooned with cockroaches, rotting garbage and empty bottles of cheap liquor still in their brown carry-out sacks. A well-used douche bag, stained with a deep red Betadine solution, hung on a hanger in the moldy bathroom.
The beatings, Florences youngest daughter, Catherine, would later tell child welfare workers, came almost daily and they rarely attended school. She and her sister Juanita had been whipped by their mother, she said, with electrical cords and flogged with the buckle end of a leather belt. Social workers also deemed their father, an alcoholic who worked as a janitor and lived in a rooming house, unfit to care for the his daughters, who were sent to the St. Louis Colored Orphans Home (now known as Annie Malone Children and Family Services).
In the late-1930s, Catherine and her older sister Juanita were adopted by a former chicken picker turned cement mixer from Middle Fork, a tiny settlement in northeast Missouri near Macon, and his college-educated wife, who hailed from the same home town. Raised in The Ville section of St. Loui-once home to tennis star Arthur Ashe, boxer Sonny Liston, comedian Dick Gregory and Rock & Roll Hall of Famers Chuck Berry and Tina Turnerthe girls flourished under the watchful eyes of Thomas Angell Hubbard and his wife Nina Grant.
Catherine and Juanita, who took their adopted fathers name, spent holidays and summers in Macon enjoying hayrides along with a bevy of new cousins. In old photographs, they appear healthy and well-fed, beaming at the camera and wearing new clothes for the first time.
However, when 15-year-old Catherine became pregnant in 1942, she was sent to live with Hubbards family in northern Illinois. She gave birth to her first and only child the following summer.
Born on July 17, 1943 in Galesburg, Wyart Taylor, Jr. was a slight boy with an apple-shaped cleft chin and serious eyes. With the his biological father largely absent, Catherine married an Army privatethe following year and moved to Minneapolis where he was stationed at Ft. Snelling.
Cat didnt talk about the time my father broke a long-neck beer bottle over a bar and sliced a mans throat for calling my mother a black bitch. I overheard my late Aunt Doris Jean saying the manknown on the streets as Redsurvived, but only because my dad had him dropped off at a nearby emergency room. It was Doris Jean, my Uncle Willie Byrds wife who was prone to gossip, who revealed another incident in 1967.
After a neighbor told my father that it was my mothers nephew who had robbed our house in broad daylight, my father beat him so badly that his jaw had to be wired shut. Because he was family, Daddy then drove my cousin to the hospital himself and paid the bill in cash.
But, the year before he succumbed to HIV/ AIDS in 1995, my brother Donniemy mothers son from a previous marriageopened up about the beatings he suffered as a child. I will never forget how he broke down that Thanksgiving sobbing, as he told me what my father had done to him.
There were few mentions about my fathers life in the newspapers of the day. I do not know if he was arrested in any of the incidents my grandmother described or others that she would not talk about. But, recently, while tracing through the archives of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I learned that he had in fact been arrested once and charged with aggravated battery related to a fight on March 5, 1967. The charge was upgraded to involuntary manslaughter when the victim, a foreign-exchange student, died after languishing on life support at Barnes Hospital.
Bog Soo Byun, a third-degree black belt from Seoul, South Korea studying engineering at Washington University, suffered a skull fracture after being repeatedly stomped and kicked. His brother Ho Soo escaped with cuts and bruises. They had come to my godmothers bar, the Gold Room, on the corner of Delmar and Euclid, to take Polaroid photographs and sell them to customers. My father ordered them out. The fight allegedly started when Bog Soo karate kicked my father, according to defense attorneys.
They told the jury that my father had acted in self-defense.
The trial, held in September 1968, ended in a hung jury and the charges against my father was abandoned.
Learning of moments like these, I wanted to forget that I was his child. The more I looked, the less he looked like the loving son and devoted husband and father I had been told about. I wondered how a man could truly love his children if he lived that life.
Even though my mother relayed side-splitting stories about her high school classmate, Anna Mae Bullockwho would later become known the world over as Tina Turnerit wasnt until two years ago, sipping salted margaritas on my sisters back porch in Tampa, that my mother told me how she met my father. Those were good times, she said as she giddily recalled spotting the man with movie-star looks walking up the street. Riding in the car with my Aunt Geraldine, she begged her sister to turn around and follow him. She watched as he went into a nearby nightspot.
My mother went home, quickly dressed up in her finest clothes and went back to the tavern. She sat at the far end of the bar, night after night, watching woman after woman make his acquaintance. He was a hairdresser, she learned, who specialized in bouffants, roller-sets, up-dos and the women who wore them.
She decided to send him a drink and that was enough to get his attention. A few weeks later, when he took sick with the flu, she nursed him back to health while his then girlfriend was watching television in the living room.
After a brief courtship, they married in my Grandmother Alices living room in a small house on Cabanne Avenue in 1966 and settled in University City. If my math is right, he was 23 and she was 25. My brother Christopher and I were born two years later.
In the summer of 68, hed been out on a bender to celebrate his birthday when my mother went into labor. When he stumbled into St. Lukes Hospital the next day, the nurse said we were gone. Thinking his wife and children were dead, he went back to the Gold Room and continued drinking until somebody saw fit to carry him home where he discovered us happy and healthy. He proudly hoisted his babies onto the bar. I was named after its owner, my godmother, Goldie Holly.
During their time together, he adorned my mother with fur coats and expensive clothes, including Chanel nightgowns, and diamond rings. A sought after hairstylist who worked nights and weekends at The Gold Room, he and my mother frequented social balls and some of the citys most notable nightclubs.
Until a few weeks ago, I never knew the details of why she left him, though I had my suspicions. The drinking and the women were likely too much. Until two years ago, when my mother finally began to crack the door on her life with my father, no one ever talked about that snowy night in January 1969. In a drunken jealous rage, hed slammed my mothers face through a plate glass window. That story rests in a keloid scar still visible above her eyebrow. If there were other incidents of violence in our house, my mother never spoke of them.
Your daddy was the love of my life, she told me, time and time again. But, that night would be the straw that broke the camels back, she said.
She hid her two older children from a previous marriage with her sister Geraldine and her husband Albert Ross, separated her babies, and went to stay with a friend at Ft. Leonard Wood until she could figure out where to go. Within weeks, she was living a new life five hours away in Chicago. On April 1, 1969 she started a job as a waitress in a family restaurant at the Marriott Hotel next to OHare Airport. She saved her money, got a place of her own and sent for her children.
One afternoon, my father showed up unannounced at the restaurant, sat in her station, and ordered coffee. He begged for forgiveness. She told me she was too afraid to go back to work the next day.
Youre a damn fool if you go back to him, her mother Alice scolded. He soon moved to Chicago, took a job at the post office and continued his entreaties.
Though they never reconciled, in time, things cooled and they returned separately to St. Louis in 1971 where she continued working for a Marriott Hotel near Lambert Field. He later moved in with a woman named Sylvia and my mother began dating Tony, a diminutive Italian man with his own checkered past who was easy on the eyes. Despite their newfound relationships, my father never gave up on my mother. He cajoled her with sweet talk and gifts, but my mother never took him back. He never stopped being hers.
My father was killed less than two years later.
I sometimes remember more than I want to about him. Sometimes I want to forget the haunting stories and hold on to Christmas mornings, and the buckets of pennies he would deliver on my birthday. I still have fond memories of the yellow kite he bought for me from Miss Cherrys store and how I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world. Hed come to Aunt Geraldine and Uncle Rosss house in East St. Louis for a family cookout. It was Memorial Day 1973 and he was still trying to find his way back into my mothers heart.
We never could get that kite to fly.
***
By all accounts, my father was a cautious man who kept few friends and allowed almost no one into his personal space. Fatefully, the night he was killed, hed decided at the last minute to go to a late night poker game.
He was worried, hed told my motherabout what and who he did not saybut couldnt not resist the temptation of easy money. He never played back his winnings and knew, if he was sober, when to walk away. Besides, the address in the 4700 Kossuth was less than a half mile from his job and mere blocks from his house on the corner of Margaretta and Euclid Avenues.
Though they never said as much, my conversations with Haymon and others led me to believe that my father might have been targeted because he had been the trigger man in the killing of Big Mike. My grandmother would have strongly disputed that notion, saying my father never shot anyone who didnt point a gun at him first. However, everything I know about this caseabout the trail of violence that seemed to follow my fathersays that it is possible.
After Big Mike was murdered, prosecutors in the federal drug case against Norton were forced to rely on written statements that detailed his alleged participation in a heroin ring being operated out of the Hi-Note Lounge located in the 4800 block of Delmar Avenue. With Jones dead, on November 26, Nortons defense attorneys saw another opportunity. They appealed to the court again in an attempt to get the case against him tossed out before a verdict could be rendered.
This time, the defense filed a motion to dismiss the indictment for failure to produce a material witness for the defendant to interview, claiming that by not arresting him when the indictment was initially handed down and denied the ability to question potential witnesses that he had been irreparably harmed. The irony, of course, was that Big Mike Jones was dead and Norton had likely planned and helped carry out his murder. And, with my father now lying in the city morgue, I found it reasonable to think that Nortons tracks had been sufficiently covered.
The motion was denied. Norton was convicted on November 28, 1973. He was sentenced to a federal prison camp on December 21, 1973. He lost a subsequent appeal, but would be released within ten years.
In 1973, Bernard Pratt and former state representative John F. Conley were also found guilty after being charged with selling heroin from the same lounge.
I believe three men are dead now; Im certain that Conley and Norton are dead. My older cousin told me Norton was destitute when he died getting high in 2002. Few of his surviving associates will talk about him. Some wont even admit that they knew Norton and others, like Lorenzo Petty, simply hang up the phone at the mention of his name.
When I first went looking for him, as an 18-year-old, first-semester college freshman in 1986, Norton was back in federal custody. This time on credit card and mail fraud charges, after he and a live-in girlfriend filled out hundreds of department store applications and made purchases under fake identities. In June 1986, I wrote him a letter in hopes that he could tell me something, anything about my father. The envelope had been opened but was re-sealed when it arrived in my student mailbox, marked return to sender.
Court records show Norton was arrested again in 1988 and convicted the following year for possession of cocaine and heroin with the intent to distribute. U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh sentenced the 38-year-old to 41 months at a federal prison camp.
Haymon says Norton didnt work directly for the Pettys in the early 70s. But multiple sources confirmed that Norton had a close relationship with the brothers and that they re-connected shortly after his second release from a federal prison.
But if Haymon is right about Norton, he did not have the stomach to kill a man. Over the course of three decades, Ive had doors slammed in my face, been hung up on and had mail returned. That silence, and a lengthy conversation with others who knew Norton, left me convinced of two things: Norton was, indeed, involved in the murders. And at least one of the co-conspiratorsmaybe even the man who killed my fathermay still be alive.
The answers, I have now come to believe, are unknowable. As my father had been when he was alive, they feel just out of reach.
***
I remember the funeral. I remember the throng of mourners, the hundreds of people who filed into the pews at Mercy Seat Missionary Baptist Church on Washington Streetwhere my maternal grandmother Alice had been a member since 1941. Her pastor, Pastor Roosevelt Brown, gave the eulogy.
I remember the baptismal pool, situated high above the pulpit and the choir stand, and the four chandeliers that dangled over the altar. I remember the beautiful brown suit mother chose for him, his jet-black shoulder-length hair and receding hairline. I remember the white flowers draped over the bronze and gold casket. The smell of lilies never left me. The wailing started when a soloist began singing His Eye Is On The Sparrow.
I sing because Im happy, I sing because Im free,
His eye is on the sparrow and I know he watches me
One by one, each of us his wife, his mother, and his children were escorted to the altar to say goodbye. My mother, brother Christopher and I were the last to stand, the last to touch him before the funeral director closed and locked the coffin. But, Ive never forgotten the stillness of his face, his perfectly etched mustache and silky smooth skin. And then, the next day, being scooped up by my godmother, carried over the gravel driveway and across the lawn at Greenwood Cemetery off Lucas and Hunt Road on St. Louis Avenue.
Of the boys and men present at the memorial service, almost none of them have survived. Nearly 20 years after we laid my father to rest, my brother Christopher was shot dead in a remarkably similar ambush and my brother Donnie succumbed to HIV/AIDS in 1995. The oldest living man in my immediate family, excluding my long-lost brother Terry, was born in 1986. For me, there are no fathers, no uncles, no grandfathers and no brothers left that I was raised with. We are a family of women. My mother, who retired after nearly 40 years with Marriott, raised us on her own.
Curiously, a pallbearer discovered a folded two-dollar bill tucked into my fathers suit pocketan omen, my decidedly superstitious Aunt Doris Jean said, of bad luck. My fathers killer was said to have been among the mourners.
EDITORS NOTE: This story is an excerpt from Taylors forthcoming memoir, Let Me Still Be Singing When Evening Comes.
Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/11/20/the-search-for-my-father-s-killer.html
