Vol.10,No.10
Jun. 6—Jun. 19,1989
FREE!
Douglas Lawrence Sheets, a former member of
a white supremacist group, was found not guilty of
three murder charges in connection with a gay
related shooting and firebombing. He was also
acquitted of an arson charge and assault with intent
to kill.
The jury in Sheets’ trial deliberated for over five
hours on May 26 before returning to Cleveland
County Superior Court and announcing their
verdict in die incident at a Shelby, N.C. adult
bookstore more than two years ago which left
three men dead and two injured.
Sheets was originally charged with 16 counts. In
the trial he faced five charges: three counts of
first-degree murder, one count of arson and one
count of assault with a deadly weapon.
As jurors returned to the courtroom, according
to an Associated Press report (News & Observer,
5/27/89), several were crying. The families of the
victims ran from the courtroom crying.
“This is a hard case to lose, but I thought the jury
could have gone either way,” said Mab Segrest,
former exexutive director of North Caroliniar'
Against Racist and Religious Violent
prosecution had two White Patnv
from prison and not a lot of physical evidence to
back up all their testimony.
“It’s not as though this jury let him off in the face
of incontrovertable evidence,” she said. “I think if
there had been a stronger case, the role
homophobia played in the jury’s decision would be
clearer.”
The lack of a witness who could place Sheets in
the area on that night hurt the state’s case, the
prosecutor said. Those who testified said they had
learned of Sheets’ role from Sheets himself. Four
had been in jail with him.
“I would have preferred having Sunday school
teachers as witnesses,” District Attorney Bill
Young said.
Sheets, who admitted his former involvement
with the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot
Party, went on trial for the slayings before an
all-whjtajury on, May 5.
v Robert Jackson was scheduled
for sn the same charges, but Young
<r alutate whether to go to trial
< Kenneth Godfrey, 29, and
fom Rutherford County —
died after three masked men entered the store on
January 17,1987, ordered them to the floor and
shot them in the head.
Two men, James Parris and John Anthony,
survived and gave investigators some details of the
attack. Evidence at the trial included emotional
testimony by Parris, a South Carolina resident He
described a night of terror in which the killers
hurled abusive language at the five men as they set
up firebombs, robbed the store of cash, forced the
men to lie down on the floor, and shot them each in
the head, several as many as four times.
Parris was unable to identify Sheets as one of the
attackers. The three men wore ski masks, and
Parris said he never saw any of their faces,
according to the Shelby Star (5/6/89).
The bookstore had received at least two threats
before the shootings, including one only hours
before the murders. Two men had entered a
bookstore booth together to watch a sexually
explicit movie, according to another patron, Leslie
Dean Watts of Forest City. When the store’s clerk,
Jerry Melton, knocked on the door of the booth
and informed the men that only one person was
supposed to be in a booth, one of the men grabbed
the clerk by the shirt and said, you re a faggot and
a queer,” Watts said. ”11)6 man shoved Melton
and said, ‘Faggot, 111 be back for your ass,’ ”
Watts testified, according to the Star (5/13/89),
adding “it scared the living daylights out of me.”
Murder victims were the bookstore clerk,
Melton, and patrons Paul Weston and Kenneth
Godfrey, all dead at the scene. Injured were Parris
and a second man, John Anthony.
Members of the victims’ families broke down
during Parris’s graphic account of the events that
night. “After I laid down, I heard some shots,”
Parris said. “Then I heard a voice I didn’t recognize
say, ‘You don’t have to do all this. Please, don’t do
this.’ And someone said, ‘Are you a goddam
faggot, too? Get down.’ ” The shooting continued,
Parris said, as someone was directed to go light the
charges on the firebombs. “Then he said, ‘Give me
your lighter, I forgot mine.’ ”
Parris fought tears throughout his testimony,
according to the Charlotte Observer (5/6/89). He
described his own shooting, which has left him
sightless in one eye. Parris, a military veteran,
continued on page 5
A narrowly-averted financial disaster and the
resignation of their executive director have brought
Durham’s Lesbian and Gay Health Project
(LGHP) to a crisis point, according to current
LGHP board members, former LGHP volunteer
leaders and other AIDS support movement
workers across the state. Board members blame
growing pains, negative publicity in The Front
Page, hostile rumors and an explosive letter from
AIDS Service Coalition spokesman David Jones
as the reasons the group’s problems, including the
departure of Jill Duvall, the group’s first and only
executive director, after a stormy three-year tenure.
But volunteers and outside observers cite the
Board’s hesitancy to confront two years of ongoing
problems as the real root of the recent turmoil.
Despite outside pressure from the media and a
recent meeting demanded by the leadership of the
AIDS Community Residence Association, specific
information about the degree of the financial
problems and the exact reasons the board refused
to let Duvall rescind her resignation have not been
addressed by LGHP board leadership. Dante
Noto, co-chair of the board, said that rumors of the
money problems have been greatly exaggerated.
“It’s not true that the Health Project was ever
broke,” he said. He denied any direct connection
between the financial crisis and the board’s
decision to accept Duvall’s resignation. She was
never asked to resign by the board, Noto said.
“Quitting was one way of letting us know how
hurt she was and how stressed she was” from three
factors: the financial situation, criticism of her job
performance from outside the Health Project, and
the lack of board support after a March 7 article in
The Front Page that caused controversy through
out the AIDS support community, Noto said.
Duvall had given the Board a resignation, then
asked to stay on in the executive director position.
They decided to refuse that request because such
behavior was “manipulative” and “unprofess
ional,” Noto said. “You can’t screw around with
us” by creating the confusion of resigning, Noto
added, explaining that Duvall had resigned and
reconsidered once before.
The issues of criticism and lack of board support
arose over the reaction to Front Page article,
“Women in the AIDS Movement Face Criticism
from Within and Without,” in which Duvall spoke
frankly of her perceptions of the problems she
faced as a woman in AIDS leadership and as the
only female head of a AIDS Service Organization
in North Carolina.
Most of the controversy centered around
Duvall’s comments that, even in the wake of the
AIDS crisis, little change had occurred the
attitudes towards classism, sexism and other
prejudices still prevalent among the gay white men
with whom she worked.
“It’s still the same damn community,” Duvall
said in the article. Her comments were perceived
by Jones, who works as a lobbyist in the General
Assembly, and others as indicating that Duvall
believed gay men are not modifying their sexual
behavior to prevent transmission of the AIDS
virus.
Jones said that he was angry and wrote a letter
to Duvall stating his strong objections to her
remarks and asking her to resign.
“It was a letter to her and not to her board,” he
said. ”1 asked her to resign based on a long history
of her political views restraining the organization...
and huge amounts of turmoil” during her time in
the executive director’s role. “Her politics
interfered with the delivery of services” that LGHP
is supposed to provide, Jones said.
Nancy Thompson, the health project’s other co
chair, said that Duvall’s comments in the article
“displayed very clearly that the board does not
have a good support system for the executive
director.” She said that competition for funding
and other outside pressures create a high degree of
stress for the director and that Duvall needed a
strong sense that the board was behind her “so it
wasn’t her against the world.”
In the face of what Duvall saw as insufficient
defense, Thompson said, “she got personally tired
of being on the front lines.” '
Noto said that Duvall's comments in the article
reflected her frustration with the position, and that
she was unprepared for “the outcry against the
article from the community.” There was a great
deal of backlash from within and without the
health project, Noto said. "Everybody I knew had
read that article and wondered what the hell was
going on.”
Jones’ letter exacerbated Duvall’s belief that she
needed stronger board support, Noto said. “He let
everyone know just how dissatisfied he was and
brought a great deal of pressure to bear on Jill.”
Duvall could not be reached for comment.
Neither Noto nor Thompson would pinpoint
why the financial problems became suddenly
obvious or exactly how bad the financial picture
had gotten in January of this year, when the board
started to examine the cash situation in detail. Both
cite a variety of factors as the cause of the
problems: an annual Christmas mail solicitation
whose profit fell far below anticipations, a benefit
concert that required extensive pre-event cash
outlay, the rejection of several LGHP grant
continued on page 11
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