could have been broken with Doutre’s arrest. But when officers checked the serial number of the shotgun against a national computer index of stolen property, they drew a blank. In Palm Beach County, the murder was only a day old and the serial number of the stolen shotgun had not yet been entered in the computer’s data bank.
But Doutre did at least put investigators hard on the trail of Richard Savage. Along with the shotgun, Maryville police had found a submachine gun in Doutre’s car. The weapon automatically meant that the nearest AFT office would be called to see if anybody wanted to question Doutre.
Grant McGarrity, a Knoxville agent, visited Doutre in jail that afternoon. Doutre was talkative, volunteering that he worked for a man named Savage who was in the business of sending people out on contract murders. Of course, Doutre denied that he had committed a crime himself.
It was interesting information. McGarrity had heard of Richard Savage and was already gathering information about weapons being mailed to and from the Continental Club.
Because Doutre said nothing that incriminated himself, he was able to post bond on the weapons charge and leave Maryville. However, the stolen shotgun remained behind in the police department’s evidence lockup.
WHILE ALL THIS was happening, Doug Norwood, the Arkansas law student, was still scared and looking over his shoulder. Police were making little headway in their investigations of the shooting and bombing that had nearly killed him. Nor were they listening to his theory that his girlfriend’s ex-husband had put hit men on his trail.
Nevertheless, Norwood’s wariness eventually helped save him a third time, and helped break open the case. On Jan. 20, 1986, Norwood grew suspicious of a car that followed him to the university, and called the two campus detectives who were investigating the bombing.
The police stopped the car and began talking to its driver, Michael Wayne Jackson. One officer spotted the barrel of a gun protruding from beneath a sweater on the front seat. Jackson was arrested and police confiscated several guns, including a semiautomatic rifle.
“There is no doubt in my mind,” says Norwood, “that Jackson was going to spray me with that machine gun.”
Jackson proved to be as talkative as Sean Doutre. He told police that he and Savage had been hired by Larry Gray, the ex-husband of Norwood’s girlfriend, to kill Norwood. And he added that Gray had contacted them through a classified ad in Soldier of Fortune magazine.
THE NEXT BREAK came on Feb. 5, when Sean Doutre was arrested again near Athens, Ga., simply because he had left a nearby motel without paying his long-distance phone bill. Once again, law officers listened raptly as Doutre gave details about Savage and the murder-for-hire business.
Shortly afterward, ATF agent McGarrity decided to visit a former Savage associate named Ronald Emert, who had been jailed in Knoxville on drug charges. Emert turned out to be one more key to the puzzle. In exchange for not being charged in any murder-for-hire plot, he told McGarrity about the trip he had made to Florida with Doutre to collect money from a man named Spearman. He also told McGarrity to check with the Maryville police about a shotgun that was gathering dust in their evidence closet.
Until that point, progress had been slow in Palm Beach County on the Spearman case. Robert Spearman had stopped cooperating with the sheriff’s department, and detectives were mostly waiting for a lucky break. It came after Emert’s conversation with McGarrity, who retrieved the shotgun from Maryville.
Palm Beach detectives flew to Knoxville, and Emert picked Robert Spearman’s face out of a lineup of photographs. Investigators then began to check records of long-distance phone calls, hotels, car rentals and other business receipts gathered from Doutre and others in the Savage gang.
Finally, the net was beginning to close. Law officers from West Palm Beach north to Minneapolis and west to Dallas gathered in Atlanta for a conference on the Savage gang. ATF designated it a national investigation.
“It all sounded so wild and far-fetched—but it was all coming back as true,” recalls the ATF’s Tom Stokes.
Law enforcement agencies began filing charges in the various conspiracies. Savage, Doutre, Jackson, Buckley and the others were jailed. So were many of the people who had hired them.
Among them was Robert Spearman, who walked out of a store on North Lake Boulevard in West Palm Beach on April 4 to find Palm Beach County Sheriff Richard Wille waiting with a warrant charging him with his wife’s murder.
THE WANT-AD killers face