PUSHING FOR JUSTICE

When Drug Cases Finally Reach Court In Beattyville, There Are No Guarantees

BEATTYVILLE - Mayor Charles Beach III had just begun to savor Operation
Grinch, a major drug bust by his police department, when the phones started
to ring.

With the defendants behind bars, a group of citizens was making calls,
sending e-mail and knocking on doors throughout Beattyville.

Come to court on Dec. 21, 2001, callers said. Help make a show of force.

The group, People Encouraging People, was formed to fight substance abuse
in the town. Its members wanted the judge and the prosecutor to know they
supported tough sentences, said Lynda Congleton, who helped create PEP.

When the day arrived, and indictments were presented, nearly 40 friends and
neighbors joined Mayor Beach and Congleton in Lee Circuit Court.

Beach surveyed the scene and said, "I think the rest of the story will be
how the courts deal with these cases."

Circuit Judge William W. Trude Jr. was not impressed.

"When you get 100 people up there sitting in the courtroom trying to put
pressure on the court, you've got a problem," Trude said recently. "I think
they were trying to intimidate me, and if I let that happen, what kind of
judge am I?"

Congleton, Beach and others assembled the crowd out of fear that the Grinch
bust would end in little more than dismissals and probation. That sort of
thing had happened before -- usually because prosecutors agreed to plea
bargains or had questions about the quality of police evidence.

Also, some in Beattyville feared what Trude, who by his own admission has
had personal contact with drug suspects, might do with the cases.

The stakes were high for Beattyville, and the small Eastern Kentucky
community was no longer keeping quiet.

Operation Grinch had its roots in outrage -- outrage Beach and others felt
as they watched drugs crawl up from the streets into polite society.

In Lee County, census data show, the gap between rich and poor is greater
than in any other Kentucky county.

For people in Beattyville, one aspect of the divide is clear: You live
either at the top of the hill, or at the bottom.

At the top are people like Mayor Beach, whose family controls the town
bank, Peoples Exchange Bank. He resides in an affluent enclave called
Gourley Heights and keeps a $500,000 home in Lexington.

Then there are those who live in mobile homes with trash in the yard, like
the one at the bottom of Beach's hill, which he passes daily in his BMW.

For decades, the embarrassment of drug addiction simply had not climbed the
hill. That changed during the 1990s.

"You started seeing how rampant it was," said Lynda Congleton, whose
husband, Terry Congleton, runs a large family business, including a
hardware store that began in 1921.

One of Lynda Congleton's stepdaughters, Camille, was a little girl in 1984,
when Michele Moore was crowned Beattyville's homecoming queen. Camille
recalls standing in the crowd, watching the parade. She wanted to be just
like the queen.

Moore was charged in the Grinch operation with trafficking drugs, just like
48 other alleged dealers.

Camille Congleton grew up to join a group of kids of Beattyville elite who
began using drugs during the 1990s. Another, whose drug treatment is
documented in court records, was Cherry Jackson, the daughter of a former
circuit judge.

Jackson peeled away in a red Camaro in response to an interview request.

During high school, Camille Congleton recalled, the group "just ruled the
school up there."

"The way we wanted it," she said, "was the way it was."

Today, Congleton lives in a mobile home in Lee County and says she no
longer uses drugs. As she sat on the sofa with her boyfriend last month and
spoke about her life, Congleton's eyes got wet.

"Look at what I could have had, and look at what I am. I will never get
that back," she said.

Her experiments with drugs started as flirtation, she said. By the end, she
saw a lot of ugly things.

"There's a lot of being taken advantage of. Pill dealers think they have
this power over you," Congleton said. "They say, 'I've got what you need.
What are you willing to do for it?'"

She shifted around on the sofa and changed the subject.

When talking about the young women, Mayor Beach looks uncomfortable, too.
It wasn't until his friends began having problems in their families that he
realized something needed to be done, he said.

"That's really where my passion came from," Beach said.

Jennifer Burgess, a friend of Beach's daughter, often came over after
school when she was younger.

Burgess, the daughter of a local school board member, was arrested in 1999
and accused of forging one of her father's checks. The case was dismissed,
but only after Larry Burgess told the judge that his daughter was addicted
to Tylox and Xanax. She was sent to a drug-rehabilitation center.

"This child grew up in our house. She was beautiful and smart as hell,"
Beach said.

Jennifer Burgess declined to comment, saying she didn't want to embarrass
her family.

Others also suffered the pain of a child's addiction.

In 1997, prosecutor Tom Hall's wife, Karen, submitted a statement during
the sentencing of a drug dealer. Karen Hall said the dealer sold Tylox to
her daughter, Lyn Pelfrey.

Pelfrey wouldn't comment for this story beyond saying she's clean these
days. She added that the drug problem is worse in Beattyville than it has
ever been. "They just need to stop it," Pelfrey said. "It's crazy. It's
killing people."

Karen Hall wrote in the statement that her daughter traded the dealer
$2,000 worth of jewelry -- presents she had received from her parents and
grandmother on her 16th birthday and other occasions. Pelfrey also hocked
$800 worth of her sister's jewelry and stole money from the family, her
mother wrote.

The Halls eventually had Pelfrey arrested to force her into treatment,
according to Karen Hall's statement. "A part of me died that day."

"When you give birth to a child, you want only the best for that child and
you work so hard to attain that," Karen Hall wrote. "When you have to face
the fact that your child is a drug addict, it tears your heart out ..."

The man who allegedly sold drugs to Hall's daughter was arrested in a drug
operation in 1995.

Few of the accused in that roundup were sentenced to prison -- which made
some in Beattyville apprehensive about the local justice system.

Fifteen cases made their way through Lee Circuit Court; 11 were probated.
One was dismissed after the defense cited insufficient evidence and the
prosecution agreed. Under a plea deal, another defendant got seven weekends
in jail.

Two cases went to trial. In one, the jury recommended that Frankie
Brandenburg, the man accused of selling to Hall's daughter, serve 15 years.
Judge Trude gave him 10. (The charges were dismissed three years later,
after the Kentucky Court of Appeals overturned the verdict. By then,
Brandenburg was out on parole.)

In the other trial, a defendant charged with selling Tylox was sentenced to
eight years. But after the defense asked for shock probation -- a request
that the prosecutor said he opposed -- Judge Trude freed the defendant in
less than 11 months.

Trude, who has been on the bench for more than a decade, says it's unfair
to pin the lack of prison time on him or any other judge.

Several factors -- from weak police work to ineffective prosecution -- can
get cases thrown out, he noted, but the public sees it as light punishment
for drug criminals.

A 1997 roundup was little different. Of 12 people facing drug-dealing
charges in circuit court, eight got probation as a result of plea bargains.

As for Michele Moore, 18 years after her homecoming parade, she still lives
in Lee County. Until a couple of weeks ago, she was staying in a small
house with particleboard ceilings and junk cars in the yard.

Mounds of dirty clothes and trash littered the home. There was a pile of
tools and car parts on the kitchen floor.

On Jan. 10, Moore moved back into her old mobile home, the same one she was
in when the police came for her during Operation Grinch in 2001.

Her mother, Patty, also still lives in the county but is trying to sell her
house.

"I feel like I'm a prisoner in my own home, and my life. I'm embarrassed to
go out, and I'm bitter," Patty Moore said. "I don't even do grocery
shopping or go into town anymore ... I feel like they're looking at me and
telling each other, 'Do you know Michele is a drug addict?'"

Grinch wasn't the end of Michele Moore's legal troubles. Last March, state
police arrested her on charges of selling what she said was
methamphetamine. As in the Grinch case, it later turned out not to be.

Also in March, Beattyville police charged Moore with making a false report
by saying that her home had been burglarized. Police said she had been seen
selling the items she reported missing.

About four months later, she was charged with forging her aunt's signature
on checks that were allegedly stolen.

Moore is scheduled to stand trial in Lee District Court in a couple months
for the state-police bust and false-report charge.

In the entry to the courthouse, there's a plaque that hangs in honor of
Jesse Moore, the county's former property valuation administrator, who died
in 1991.

Carved on the plaque are the words, "Father of Michele Moore."

It's hard to say whether his daughter will stop in front of his picture and
read the many accomplishments listed below. "Sometimes I can't even look at
him," she said.

Whatever passes through her mind, Michele Moore, once the future of
Beattyville, probably won't linger before walking upstairs, to the courtroom.

She will be there, after all, to answer for what she has become.

"What I hope happens is we have a healthier community," said-Lynda
ConglEton, who helped start a group to fight substance abuse.