The conclusion of 

Animal parts and broken hearts

 

Fast food entrepreneur Paul Leverett had everything he desired on the Alabama coast, except the absence of his long-abused wife, Elizabeth. He hired someone to solve that problem and detained the children on errands one afternoon...

 

Liz left home in the early afternoon. A neighbor saw her with a towel wrapped around her head, bound for her 1:30 p.m. appointment. Las Damas owner Linda Proctor told a Press-Register reporter Liz was in a “very, very good mood” having just returned from a visit with Kathy in Houston.

Rickey Prewitt pulled into the parking lot of the shopping center just behind the Leverett home. He parked his car and walked the three-tenths of a mile to the Leverett’s Montcliff Drive address.

The erstwhile assassin opened the back door, padded down the hallway and hid in the closet. He nervously flexed his grip on a .38 Smith & Wesson.

Liz left Las Damas around 3 p.m., telling Proctor she had errands to run. Up the hill toward home, Liz stopped at the dry cleaner to retrieve her clothes.

Back home, she hummed as she walked to her bedroom.

Prewitt sprang.

“She immediately threw up her hands and said, ‘Oh my God, don’t kill me,’” Prewitt testified. “I told her-to try to calm her down-that I was just a robber.”

Liz pulled off her ring and dropped it on the floor. But then she knew.

“She told me she wanted to make her peace with God,” Prewitt said. “I gave her a minute to do it.”

Prewitt picked up a sofa cushion and held against her head, shooting her twice. He pulled out the knife and made a strong slice across her throat, then quickly pierced her chest over and over.

He ran for the back door and a knock came from the front. It was the roofers who had come by to correct a job. “I panicked a bit,” Prewitt said.

The killer almost forgot something integral and had to run back to the room to retrieve the diamond ring.

Prewitt jumped into Liz’s Oldsmobile and darted to the parking lot where she picked up her cleaning, where his car awaited.

As Prewitt slammed the car door behind him, Liz’s favorite outfit rustled in the clear bag on the hook over a back window, unworn, unfulfilled.

Near 5:30 p.m., Paul finally headed for the house with the kids. Thirteen-year-old Lee was antsy.

“Paul told her to make sure she went straight in and threw her new jeans on the bed in his bedroom,” Dot George said. “She was supposed to be the one to find the body.”

But as she entered the house, the phone rang. Lee tossed the pants onto the couch and ran to answer in her bedroom.

Paul came in behind her and strode to the bedroom himself. He later claimed to have “blubbered like a stuck hog” when he discovered Liz’s corpse. Lee would testify he didn’t cry at all.

Paul notified authorities.

“You should hear the voice on that 911 call,” former district attorney Chris Galanos said. “It’s just as icy as anything you can imagine.”

“When the police got there, Paul’s attorney was already there,” Dot George said. “He said he was just driving by and saw all the commotion.”

 

Birds of a feather

Meanwhile, Prewitt left and went straight to Hilton Robinson. Robinson owned the House of Bargains, a place he described as “a cross between a flea market and an antique store.” Admittedly, the 57-year-old owned a fencing spot where young “junkies” came and exchanged stolen goods for money and drugs.

Robinson and Prewitt met in November of 1979 at a Halls Mill Road bar where Prewitt was working as a bouncer. Prewitt passed him a card that said he did “collections” and Robinson later took him up on the offer.

The fence testified Prewitt was in bad shape that afternoon. While riding around, the young man showed Robinson a bloody knife, a blue steel revolver and another gun and said he had just finished “a job.” It was obvious to Robinson it had been his first murder.

For now, the assassin had something he wanted to “hock.” He revealed the diamond ring and asked $1,000 for the jewel.

Robinson claimed the men stopped on the roadside and removed the stone.

“They threw the ring into Halls Mill Creek,” Dewey George said.

“We felt from the beginning that Paul Leverett was behind it,” Chris Galanos said. “The trick was going to be proving it. What kind of impediments could you encounter in investigation?”

“Someone with his connections can make it harder to come across things,” Williams said. “We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

Paul Leverett’s statement to police is speckled with possible excuses and alibis. He offered that there had been plenty of company the last night and that any door could have been left open.

The Georges maintain he lied about arguing with his wife that day, that Lee claimed he and Liz fought over the daughter’s behavior both that day and the day before.

He goes into great detail about his whereabouts for the day. His tangential forays into subjects like where his housekeeper lived seemed a product of nervousness.

The family left the house while the investigation took course. Within days, they were allowed to return.

“The first thing he did when they got back,” Dot George said, “was to tell the girls, Lee and Kathy and Cindy (George, Dot’s daughter) to go into the bedroom and clean all the blood up. And there was blood everywhere. Then he told them, ‘You get every picture of her, all her clothes, every thing of hers and get rid of it. Go throw it in the dumpster behind Colonel Dixie, just get it out of here.’”

“At the funeral, he wouldn’t let the kids cry,” Dot continued. “He didn’t want anybody there. He didn’t want there to be flowers either. He tried to send them back and we stopped him.”

“After the funeral, we went out to the gravesite and the flowers on the grave were all ripped up, just torn up all over the place,” Dot said as shook her head. “It was the weirdest thing.”

William McEvoy returned to Mobile from a fishing trip and his wife told him of the murder. “I was scared to death,” he said.

He saw Leverett that evening. “I was real shook up,” McEvoy testified. “Leverett said not to worry about anything, that everything was alright.”

Prewitt called Leo Brown’s and asked about his remaining cash.

McEvoy said Leverett would later help him, ensuring a $3,500 loan and co-signing a $12,500 note.

Phyllis DeGraaf was a married mother from Grand Bay. An attractive blonde, she first met Paul Leverett in 1977 and claimed to have sought his counsel in March of 1980 while seeking a detective agency to trail her husband, Jack DeGraaf.

It was rumored Paul and Phyllis were intimately involved. Cynthia Jones, a Col. Dixie employee testified she saw Paul and Phyllis together four or five times in April, May and June of 1980.

The Georges claim Paul told Kathy he and Phyllis slept together the night after Liz’s murder.

The children claimed Phyllis all but moved in two weeks after the murder.

“She came by the house one night and Mark stayed up to see if she left,” Dot said. “Her car was still there in the morning.”

Prewitt arrived at Hilton Robinson’s store around June 20, 1980. Prewitt enticed him to sell his truck if he found someone to offer $4,500 for it.

Prewitt slid a “for sale” sign onto the dashboard and 20 minutes later, a man arrived but left when others pulled up. Within minutes he was back and examined the truck, including starting the engine.

He exited the cab, gave Robinson the keys and said he would have to see others before making a decision.

When Prewitt returned 20 minutes later, he went to the truck, reached inside and pulled out an envelope. Robinson said it contained a stack of $100 bills.

“Did you recognize that guy that was here last?” Prewitt asked.

Robinson described the man in court as short, in his late 40s or 50s with a receding hairline.

“That was Paul Leverett,” Prewitt said. “He’s the husband to the wife I done the job on, that you better realize the magnitude of it and keep your mouth shut.”

The bag contained $6,000. McEvoy described the extra $1,000 as a bonus for “a job well done.”

In June of 1980, Phyllis and Jack DeGraaf separated and Sept. 8, they were divorced. On Nov. 15, Phyllis and Paul Leverett married. It was the first available opportunity to marry following the state’s 60-day ban following divorce and a mere six months after Liz was slain.

“Paul made the children stand up with him at the wedding,” Dot George said. “They weren’t allowed to cry at the funeral but they sure cried that day.”

In June of ‘82, Phyllis DeGraaf Leverett was charged with perjury before the grand jury. She testified in December of 1981 that she had no association with Paul Leverett during April, May and June of 1980.

It was confirmed in court that Paul Leverett not only met Phyllis’ mother during that period, but also hired a detective agency to follow Phyllis’ then-husband, Jack.

Phyllis claimed she turned to Leverett because she met him in years previous and found him to be “an outstanding personality” and a “knowledgeable businessman.” She claimed their romantic relationship began in July of 1980.

Judge Braxton Kittrell threw the case out for lack of evidence.

 

Flushing quarry

The investigation was “hard going.”

Dot and Dewey George knew what they felt and spurred things forward. Dot instructed Lee to spirit away Liz’s diary and deliver it to her aunt. Dot knew in its pages could lie the impetus for investigators.

“It lit a fire under my butt, reading that thing,” Wilbur Williams said.

“Dot George was the reason so much of this stayed alive,” Bob Eddy said. “She really kept things moving forward.” According to Williams and Eddy, police investigators at that time were severely taxed and concentration was precious.

Yet, life continued as normal. A Baldwin County home was burglarized. “Some family named Radcliff,” Bob Eddy said. ‘They took the silver but left the weapons.”

Distraught over things, the Radcliffs soon decided on a get-away to New Orleans to relax. While in the Crescent City, they wandered through shops on Magazine Street looking for replacement silver when they stumbled upon their former set. The items were traced back to Hilton Robinson in Mobile.

The transfer of stolen goods over state lines constituted a federal crime and Hilton was welcomed into the penal system.

In the fall of 1982, Chris Galanos received a call.

“They were telling me to get down to Tallahassee,” the former D.A. said. “They said that an inmate had information on the Leverett murder. So we went down there and listened and Hilton Robinson told us all about Rickey Prewitt.”

“Now there were gaps in his story,” Galanos continued, “but there always are. They never tell you everything the first time, so I go back down there with (investigators) Vince Richardson and Wilbur Williams and we decide we want everything.”

Then a young attorney not long from law school, Galanos credited veteran defense attorney Bob Clark with enticing the rest of the story from Robinson in order to solicit a deal.

“I’ll never forget, we were sitting at this makeshift table against the wall,” Galanos said, “and I’m in the middle and Bob’s on one side of me and Robinson’s on the other. And I’m in this revolving chair and Hilton just says, ‘Turn around boy,’ and I wheel around and he reaches over and grabs my tie.”

Galanos was unsure. “He leaned in and said, ‘You think you’re smart but I’m smarter. Go to my house and get my wife to let you in and look in my closet. And in my ties, if you look at this number tie from this side,’ and he tells me what it looks like and said, “If you look right in here in the tie,’ and shows me, ‘you’ll find the diamond you’re looking for.’”

Law enforcement retrieved the stone, then the jeweler and X-rays confirmed its identity.

Ricky Prewitt was next on the list. Bob Eddy arrived at the Baldwin County home of Angie Smith, a former Prewitt roommate from September of 1980 until February of 1981.

“So I’m talking to her,” Eddy said. “And I notice all these (ammunition) cartridges there and I can’t help but wonder what they are, so I ask her. She said she collected them and started naming off who gave them to her.”

When she said the name Rickey Prewitt, Eddy asked how she knew. “Because it’s got his initials on it right here,” Eddy recalled. She pointed to the serial number and the “RP” that stood for “Remington Pistols.”

Eddy asked and she turned the cartridge over to him.

A chemical analysis at FBI laboratories identified the cartridge as belonging to the same batch of rounds found in Elizabeth Leverett.

“I remember on a Saturday night, Tom Farmer called me at home,” Galanos said, “and said, ‘Your boy is in the Ramada Inn on Government Street.’ I jumped up and was headed down to meet him.”

The police picked Prewitt up on an outstanding traffic ticket charge and impounded his silver Lincoln Continental.

“I was down with the police,” Galanos said, “and Billy Mingus looks at me and says, ‘Well, what you want me to do with him, Tiger?’ They wanted him brought up on the old charge and I finally told him, ‘I want you to lock him up on murder.’”

The trial arrived in January of ‘83. The FBI analyst and Angie Smith appeared. Hilton Robinson testified.

Prewitt’s lawyer, Neal Hanley, claimed Robinson was merely trying to deflect guilt from himself.

Ackerman Supply Company operator Tony Busbee was called to testify for the prosecution to the fact Prewitt bought a box of the matching ammunition from him. While under oath, Busbee said Prewitt couldn’t have been in Mobile at the time of the murder because he was in Ackerman, 210 miles away.

Busbee claimed to have a dated receipt for Prewitt’s purchase of a weed eater on the afternoon of the crime.

Galanos objected to the inclusion of the receipt as evidence. The judge called a recess.

Wilbur Williams was present.

“I started thinking about that receipt,” Williams said. “So while we were in recess I wandered over to the table and started looking at all the receipts that were there with it. Suddenly, I’m looking and I notice it’s out of sequence. Ticket number 14 was dated on Saturday, ticket 15 was on Friday and ticket 16 was on Saturday. It wasn’t right.”

“Wilbur told me about it,” Galanos said. “He said, ‘Well, I’m not an attorney but if I were you I’d withdraw that objection and move to have all the receipts entered as evidence.’”

“I was so nervous waiting on that judge to come back,” Galanos said. “I was just hoping (Prewitt attorney) Neal Hanley didn’t catch it.”

The judge returned, accepted all new evidence and Hanley never objected.

Galanos saved his revelation of the forgery for the prosecutor’s rebuttal during closing statements, when Hanley would have no chance to respond. “I remember he told the jury he was going to drop an atomic bomb on the defense when he revealed it,” Williams said.

The jury returned a guilty verdict after two hours of deliberation. Leverett’s relatives were relieved while Angie Smith and another witness were so distraught the judge had them removed.

Prewitt received a sentence of life without parole.

Four weeks after arriving at prison in Montgomery, Prewitt changed.

“We got a call from the warden at Kilby,” Galanos said. “I took a plane up there.”

Bob Eddy hopped into a car and raced northward.

“Every time I saw Rickey Prewitt before that, he had this intense animus in his eyes,” Galanos said. “This time, his features had softened. He was different.”

Galanos said lawyer Neal Hanley pleaded with Prewitt to remain silent.

Prewitt spilled the story of Leverett and McEvoy. “I remember he even told us how he took the gun apart,” Williams said. “He took it apart and switched it around and got rid of the different parts in different places.”

The indictment of Paul Leverett was quick.

“Bob Eddy called us to let us know he was going to pick up Paul,” Dot George said. “I wanted to watch but he wouldn’t tell us any more. He didn’t want us there.”

“Eddy and Cookie Estes picked up Leverett at the Colonel Dixie out at Demetropolis and 90 within an hour of the indictment,” Galanos said.

It was Feb. 4, 1983, nine years to the day after Paul presented Liz with her diamond ring.

The Leverett trial was moved to Montgomery due to three years of previous publicity that had tainted the Mobile jury pool.

“There were people who were driving back and forth each day,” Galanos said. “Women that would come and bring a brown bag lunch so they wouldn’t have to give up their seats to go eat.”

McEvoy testified, as did Prewitt. Even Lee Leverett, then 16 years old, was sworn in to speak of her father’s threatening behavior.

When Prewitt was forced to explain his need to confess, he said he was tired of seeing Elizabeth Leverett’s face in his dreams.

When presented with the blood-soaked pillow through which Liz was shot, Prewitt cried. He fingered Paul Leverett as the man who contracted the job.

When her wounds were discussed-the 13 stabbings, the throat slashed so badly her windpipe was severed-family members had to leave the courtroom. Prewitt explained that other hit men told him “you had to kill them twice, to make sure they don’t testify against you.”

The trial lasted six days.

“When the jury went into deliberation, I went into this little Catholic church across the street from the court house,” Galanos said. “That was where I waited it out. I’ve been back since then and every time I’m there, I think of that day.”

The jury took three-and-a-half hours to return a guilty verdict. The only disappointment was their waiver of the capital-murder charge in favor of murder. Paul was sentenced to life and would be eligible for parole.

“This was one of those cases that reinforces everything you hear about tenacity,” Galanos said. “Everyone worked together and no one gave up.” He remarked on the extraordinary cooperation on the part of law enforcement at various levels.

“I think this is the case I was most proud of,” Galanos confessed.

 

Cleaning game

Paul Leverett was taken into state custody and, true to form, ingratiated himself with the right people. While at maximum-security St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, he taught illiterate inmates to read and write.

Word got around about his knack for hunting. In 1991, he was moved from St. Clair to a Black Belt facility mostly unknown except in the right circles.

Sitting 40 miles south of Tuscaloosa and 100 miles west of Montgomery, the 4,400-acre Charles A. Farquhar State Cattle Ranch in rural Hale County was founded to supply beef for the Alabama penal system. It ended up a private hunting and fishing preserve for state legislators and dignitaries.

Its namesake was appointed warden in 1956 by Gov. Jim “Big Jim” Folsom.

“I don’t think anyone in the state has known as many politicians as Charlie Farquhar,” prison system spokesman John Hale told a Press-Register reporter in the mid-’90s. “There’s not an official in any county in the state that hasn’t been hunting there.”

Farquhar planted pecan trees, began programs to raise quail and catfish and turned the facility into one of the state’s best pleasures for the constant stream of visitors. The 100-inmate population kept things humming along under the most minimal of security measures. There were no barbed wire fences or security towers but there were baseball fields, picnic pavilions and duck ponds in addition to the 700 head of cattle and 400 acres of catfish ponds.

Reassignment to the ranch was via a Montgomery review board but the warden had final word on which prisoners were allowed there.

Chris Galanos was unaware Leverett was considered for the ranch. “Had I known,” he said, “I would have opposed it.”

In spring of 1992, Farquhar took Leverett and another inmate to a bird dog field trial competition in Hamilton, Miss. The inmates dressed in civilian clothes and rode in the warden’s personal vehicle.

The trip was in violation of corrections policy.

Field trials among private hunting organizations and clubs were common at the ranch and before long Leverett was in charge of the Farquhar’s personal hunting dogs and living in private quarters near the kennels. The other 99 inmates slept in a dormitory elsewhere on the grounds.

On two occasions, Farquhar presented Leverett with weapons for birthday gifts, one a 12-gauge Beretta shotgun and the other a 20-gauge Remington shotgun. Both were kept hidden behind clothes in a cabinet in Leverett’s private quarters.

Official corrections policy expressly prohibits such.

“Man, there were wild stories about that place,” Wilbur Williams said. “The inmates would be waiting on guests, doing everything for them.”

Did Williams ever hear of inmates having access to weapons? “Yeah, I heard sometimes the guests would get so drunk they couldn’t shoot the game so inmates would bag the birds for them and clean them afterwards.”

Williams didn’t comment but chuckled at comparisons of the ranch to a modern day plantation complete with slave labor.

In October of 1994, 27-year-old Kelvin Washington, serving 20 years for killing a Tuscaloosa police officer, snapped. He bludgeoned the 74-year-old warden to death with a shotgun found in his house, then raped Farquhar’s 68-year-old wife and tied her to the furniture.

Leverett and another inmate ran to the house, but the rampaging prisoner shot them to death.

Washington then ignited the stove, threw a blanket over it to set the house ablaze and tried to blend in with the rest of the population. Blood spots on his white clothing gave him away.

Leverett’s journey was over.

“I hate the guy got killed,” Bob Eddy told a Press-Register reporter in 1994, “but I don’t have much sympathy for people who kill other people or have people killed.”

“He was supposed to be in prison,” Dot George said that same year, “but I wouldn’t call that a prison, being on a farm doing the things he loved to do most, hunt fish, have his dogs, his guns. That wasn’t punishment. It was what he loved. That was just like being paroled.”

“He got what he deserved,” she summarized.

Farquhar Cattle Ranch came under new management that cracked down on the lax security and measures. Inmates were all moved into the proper facilities and the state stopped hunting there after the murders. The governor’s office discussed a plan to turn it into a public hunting preserve under the direction of the Alabama Department of Conservation.

Charles Thompson, the new warden, said the ranch would likely leave the business of raising quail and would cease the training of hunting dogs.

Bob Eddy moved from the Mobile County District Attorney’s office to similar duties in Montgomery before retiring from an administrative position with the Department of Public Safety.

Wilbur Williams advanced to the rank of major in the Mobile Police Department then retired. He currently serves as the chief of police in Andalusia, Ala.

Chris Galanos became a circuit judge in 1994. After five years on the bench, he returned to private practice. He claimed to have struck up a friendship of sorts with Prewitt and that they keep in loose contact.

Phyllis Degraaf Leverett remarried twice after Paul went to prison.

Dot and Dewey George are retired and live in West Mobile.

“Little” Paul Leverett III worked in the oil business for years before succumbing to brain cancer in Indonesia last year.

Mark Leverett went on to Southern Methodist University and married. He still lives away from Mobile.

Lee Leverett, the youngest at the time of Liz’s death fell under her aunt and uncle’s care.

“She lived with us for a while,” Dot George said. “Now she’s out west.”

Dot feels Lee might have suffered the most. “She and Liz were so close, together all the time. Lee never did some of the things the other kids did, go to college or get married,” Dot said. “She still calls all the time and just says, “I miss Mom.’”

Dot's face as she touches the weathered diary says the same.