Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 19, 1993 TAG: 9307190138
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MILL GAP LENGTH: Long
Ned Madison talks about killing Mike Sweeney the same way he talks about killing the coyotes that attack sheep on the farm where he's lived for much of the last half of his 81 years.
He kills coyotes to protect the sheep. He shot Mike Sweeney to protect himself.
"I done what I had to do," Madison says.
Later this month, a Highland County jury is scheduled to decide if it was self-protection or murder when Madison shot Sweeney in the back of the head with a rifle last October.
The trial will hinge on Ned Madison's age: Was a then-80-year-old man justified in shooting a much younger and bigger man who came to his home and threatened to give him an "ass whipping?"
The jury will have to decide if Madison shot Sweeney in cold blood as Sweeney tried to leave or if Sweeney waited a split-second too long and turned to run at the moment Madison fired.
Neighbors were stunned when they learned that the man they thought of as a kindly grandfather had been charged with murder.
Madison - snaggle-toothed, with a hefty stomach and fluffy hair as white as the lambs he protects from coyotes - walks with a cane to steady his wobbly legs. One was crushed by heavy equipment before he retired from the railroad more than 20 years ago.
Even Sheriff Herb Lightner was shocked. Not only was it Highland County's first murder case in eight years, but the accused hadn't had any major run-ins with the law since running moonshine during the Depression.
Lightner grew up on the opposite side of the mountain from the farm where Madison has lived and worked for Glenna Curry since her husband died in the 1930s.
"It's always seemed he was old," says Lightner, who at 33 is the youngest sheriff in Virginia. "We went hunting together. He was a good man, just a man that farmed all his life. If he tells you something, you can take it to the bank."
On the afternoon of Oct. 27, 1992, Madison called Lightner and said, "There's a man lying out in the yard. I shot him."
Lightner says he has little reason to doubt Madison's story. After getting Madison's phone call, Lightner drove up the rutted half-mile-long dirt drive to the shabby frame farmhouse where Madison lives. He found Sweeney lying face up by a yard gate, his head blown apart.
Lightner looked around the yard and at the two-story farmhouse. Smoke filled the back part of the house.
"Ned hollered for me to come on in." Lightner found Madison in the kitchen, surrounded by smoke from a burnt meal of cornbread and beans. "I had some . . . cornbread and brown beans and that son-of-a-bitch made me burn them up," Madison said.
Before Lightner could say much of anything, Madison, with the bluntness of a man of few words, said, "I'm the man responsible for the guy lying there." He pointed to the gun he used - a .222-caliber rifle with a scope. "It's a varmint rifle," Madison says.
Lightner asked what happened. Madison replied that he was in his kitchen when it began. "I mixed up a pan of cornbread and put it in the stove," he said in a court statement. "Put me on a pot of beans and I looked out and I saw this fellow Sweeney . . . coming up the road walking. He come up to the gate. He hollered in to me. He said, `You son of a bitch, I'm going to whip you.' "
Madison picked up his rifle and stepped into the yard. He said Sweeney told him again that "he was going to whoop my damn ass."
"I said, `Mike, don't you come near me.' He kept coming towards me and I raised the gun up and I touched the trigger. Now that's as far as I can tell you. I'm the man who pulled the trigger."
The two were about 20 feet apart when Madison fired, using the scope to aim. In the rush of the situation, he says, he didn't notice that Sweeney had turned to leave or run. The bullet went into the back of Sweeney's head, slightly above and behind the right ear. Sweeney's right forearm received fragment wounds as if he'd raised his hand to protect himself.
Madison says he's too old to fight anymore and was afraid he'd be seriously hurt or killed if Sweeney - 35, 6 feet tall and 200 pounds - got hold of him.
"I meant to stop him," he says.
Bad blood Lightner says the bad blood seems to revolve around Glenna Curry, the 85-year-old widow on whose farm Madison has lived and worked for much of the time since the late 1930s. She's a tiny, bent woman who speaks with the soft lilt of the southern Appalachians. Sweeney was married to her granddaughter.
Madison was hired to work part time on the farm soon after Curry's husband died from reaction to typhoid medication at a Civilian Conservation Corps camp during the Depression.
Madison stayed at the farm on weekends and worked much of the rest of the time with the C&O Railway as an equipment operator and a gandy dancer, repairing rail.
In 1971, Curry's son, who ran the farm, died when a tractor turned over on him, leaving Curry to raise his two children. About the same time, Madison retired from the railway after his leg was crushed.
He moved in full time with Curry and the children.
Madison and Curry deny rumors that they are or were lovers.
"He had no home and I needed him," she says with the same bluntness Madison uses. She pulls at the tips of her shoulder-length gray hair. Besides, she says, "I didn't have that urge."
Madison says simply, "Me and Miss Curry are just good friends. We made our home together . . . I'm an old bachelor."
They also raised Curry's two grandchildren.
One of the grandchildren, Jerry Curry, lives in a trailer at the beginning of the rough drive to the farm. Jerry runs the farm with a little help from Madison, and Curry says Jerry stands to inherit the whole thing when she dies.
The other grandchild, Pam, is the widow of the man Madison shot.
Pam Sweeney remembers Madison as mean and verbally rough on her when she was a child. She's 28 and says, "My husband was the first person who really stood up to him."
Jerry Curry remembers their childhood differently. Madison has a temper, but his sister, Pam, got in trouble because she wouldn't pitch in with chores, he says. Glenna Curry agrees: "Pam was right sassyfired" as a child.
Curry says that, over the years, she accumulated a nice pot of life savings and Pam and Mike Sweeney came to her for financial help several times. She says she lent them $20,000 to buy a home in Covington. When they moved to Boones Mill, she put up another $25,000 for a trailer home there.
She willingly let them have the money even though the old farmhouse she shares with Madison is falling down around them. "I thought they needed it," Curry says.
Ned Madison thought differently. "Basically they was just trying to rob her," he says. He resented it because he sees himself as "taking care of her." That's been especially true since she broke a hip a year ago and hobbles around on a walker.
On the day of the killing, Pam came to the farmhouse early to take her grandmother to Covington to sign over some property so that Pam could get a car loan. Madison didn't like it.
He told Pam that Glenna Curry was too frail to leave the farm. Pam dressed her and took her anyway.
Madison won't say exactly what he said, but Pam says he threatened her and told her not to come back.
Later that afternoon, Pam and Mike Sweeney drove by her brother's home so Glenna Curry could see her great-grandchildren. Sweeney drank a little bit, and talked about what Madison had said to Pam that morning.
The more he talked, the angrier he got.
Pam says her husband was normally "all heart," but he was also protective of her. They didn't consider themselves to be bleeding her grandmother of money. The loans were natural - family helping family, she says.
Pam tried to talk her husband out of confronting Madison.
Jerry Curry also tried. When he heard Sweeney say, "I'm going to go up there and kick his ass," Jerry asked Sweeney to go with him to shoot groundhogs. Sweeney refused. When Jerry left, Sweeney walked up to the farmhouse where Madison was fixing his cornbread and beans.
"I don't even begin to know why things went the way they did," Pam says.
Jerry thinks he knows what happened. "One was just as stubborn as the other. They're too much alike."
Keywords:
FATALITY AND PROFILE
by CNB