Town note
Named after Fitzhew Reed, who settled at a spring near the original town site; the name became Reed's Spring.
about 0:07:51The story
Reeds Spring is a small town in Stone County, in the Ozarks of south-western Missouri, close to the Arkansas border. The episode's story begins with Lloyd Lawrence, a heavy-set man of 67 who lived there with his wife Frankie, 68. They had been married since 1947 and were successful in business. Lloyd was also, as the episode tells it, the undisputed king of rural Missouri meth in the 1980s. He had started out promoting cockfights and dogfights, and he began making meth partly to dose his fighting roosters and partly because the men at the fights wanted it. His operation was tucked away in the hills and hollers, and he had lookouts and a reputation for violence. He was especially fond of his grandson Willie, the son of his oldest son Buck. In 1986 Willie was paralysed from the waist down in a car accident, and afterwards Lloyd fitted him out with a four-wheeler, tying the boy's shoelaces to the front rack so that his feet would not drag. Willie was 18 by the spring of 1988.
He also loved cockfights, which is probably how the two men came together. When he kept pushing, Lloyd gave him some pink-coloured crank that was not part of his usual batches. He decided to get away.
The couple went first to Michigan and then to Palmdale, California. They went to Arizona, where Mary bought him a 12-gauge shotgun in Phoenix. By March they were in Cottonwood, Arizona.
In late March 1988 he bought an HK Model 91 .308 assault rifle in Alexandria, Louisiana, and told Mary that he had to settle things with Lloyd or they would be running for the rest of their lives. They drifted back through Arkansas and camped near Chadwick, Missouri, on 9 and 10 May 1988. He told Mary that if Lloyd was at his cabin in rural Taney County that weekend, the time had come to kill him.
On 13 May 1988 Mary drove him to a county road just inside the Taney County border, near where U.S. Highway 65 crosses Bear Creek. He was dressed in camouflage, with camouflage paint on his face, and carried a backpack, knives, a .357 Smith and Wesson pistol, the shotgun and the rifle. He told Mary to come back each day and look for orange ribbons tied to trees under the highway bridge; if she saw them, she was to drive north on Highway 65 and he would be waiting. The next day he watched Lloyd's property from a hillside, saw a cream-coloured pickup arrive and leave, and later crept close enough to the cabin to hear the radio inside. He startled some birds, the dogs noticed, and he withdrew to a dry creek bed for the night.
Early on 15 May 1988 he built a blind out of cut branches in a semicircle around a large tree, about 15 feet from the road that ran from the cabin down to a small creek, and waited for hours. Around noon Willie came past first on his four-wheeler, riding fast. Lloyd and Frankie followed more slowly on a second vehicle. He took Lloyd's watch, wallet and rings, removed $600 from the wallet and hid it under a log, turned off the vehicles and picked up the spent shotgun shells.
Retha Lawrence, Lloyd and Frankie's daughter, found the three bodies in the creek bed and called the police. They went through Illinois, Colorado and Nevada and ended up back in Phoenix, where they stayed for the rest of 1988 and pawned their guns. Missouri Highway Patrol investigators went to Phoenix. He said the only thing he hated about the case was Willie, because Willie would have recognised him and he had to kill him too.
He could not find a lawyer, and two hearings were postponed while the public defender's office said it could not afford to represent him. He announced that he had found religion and that God would be his lawyer. The defence called no witnesses in the guilt phase.
It was moved to 10 February because Pope John Paul II was visiting St Louis. The Pope praised the decision. Lloyd and Frankie's son David complained that the family had not been told before the announcement.