ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 2, 1996 TAG: 9608020047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SPARTANBURG, S. C.
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
note: lede
Earl Bramblett said he believed his arrest was inevitable.
"I can't say I was surprised," Bramblett said Thursday morning at the Spartanburg County Jail. "I figured, and I've told some of my relatives this, `I will be arrested as soon as the police find enough people to lie for them.'''
Twenty minutes after signing extradition papers that would send him back to Virginia, Bramblett talked about the web of lies and distortions he says police created to build a capital murder case against him.
He denied the statements police say he made to them, goading officers to arrest him for murder.
He said he knows police have been watching him and have likely done so for much of the past two years.
He called his boss at a Spartanburg screen-print shop a police informant. And he described the idea that he was trying to hide from authorities as "ridiculous."
Thursday, Bramblett said he wanted to return to Virginia, where he faces capital murder, first-degree murder and arson charges in the deaths of four people he once said he considered family - Blaine and Teresa Hodges and their two daughters, Winter and Anah.
"It still might not be in my best interest to do it, but I want to get this over with," he said.
Late Thursday, Bramblett arrived at the Roanoke County Jail, where he will be held without bond.
Bramblett said his mistrust of the police is based on a sexual molestation charge filed against him in 1984 by a girl who worked in his Roanoke screen printing shop. Police manipulated the girl to charge him, he said. The charge was dismissed because of lack of evidence.
"I have very little faith in the police in Virginia," he said. "It's not a question as to what I have to hide. It's a question of what I have to fear, and I fear crooked police."
Authorities involved with the case could not be reached for comment Thursday. So far, they have not disclosed what led them to arrest Bramblett. Nor have they disclosed a possible motive for the Hodgeses' slayings. Search warrants filed in Spartanburg this week, however, say evidence found during searches of Bramblett's motel room, rented storage shed and a trash bin shortly after the killings link him to the crime.
For the past two years, life has been quiet but tense for the 54-year-old screen printer.
At the advice of his attorney in Roanoke, Jonathan Rogers, he left Virginia shortly after the Hodgeses were killed, he said.
"I was emotionally distraught," Bramblett said, pausing for a moment to hold back tears. "I was emotionally destroyed by the situation. When I went into the Vinton Police Department, voluntarily, and talked to them ... and when they did their search that night, the next morning I went to see Jonathan Rogers, and I saw those police officers had lied, lied their butts off. Then I was scared to death. I knew where they were coming from, and knew what they were going to do, and I knew their morals or ethics or whatever you want to call it, and I knew I was in trouble."
Rogers confirmed that he advised Bramblett not to talk to investigators or submit to a lie detector test, as they had requested. Rogers suggested that Bramblett leave town.
"I told Earl then that I didn't feel comfortable with the situation and that they were trying to set him up," Rogers said.
"From what Earl said, they were misquoting him all over the place," he said. "If that were so, it didn't make any sense for him to put his head in the lion's mouth" by talking further with police.
Bramblett left. He visited his sister in Indiana, he said. He traveled to northern New York, but he didn't like the cold. He even came back to Virginia several times.
"I was just wandering, lost," he said.
He landed in a bus stop in Gastonia, N.C., and took the advice of another traveler, who suggested Spartanburg. The man said the rescue mission there had the best food in town and could find him a job. Bramblett hitched his way there.
He wasn't hiding, he said.
He said he believed that if he was on a fugitive list, authorities would have found him when he checked into the mission.
"Where would a fugitive or anybody go who's on the run; they'd go to a mission," he said. "I figure if I was on a list somewhere, my name would have popped up there."
He always used his real name, and purchased a truck and a car on his own credentials, he said. When asked why he had altered his Social Security number, he said he accidentally transposed the numbers.
Bramblett will not talk about the morning of Aug. 29, 1994, when the Hodgeses' home was set on fire. Teresa Hodges, 37, was found strangled, her body badly burned. Her husband Blaine Hodges, 41, and their daughters, Winter, 11, and Anah, 3, were each shot in the head.
"I'm going to be talking around a certain period of time," Bramblett said. "Because ... things I could say can be taken and twisted and distorted and my life is on the line."
He questions whether some members of the family are really dead.
"I've had a gut feeling that possibly that Winter, Anah and maybe Blaine were in a witness protection program and that they were alive and well," he said. "It just came to me one day and stayed in my head.
"I knew something had happened to Teresa," he said, because a Hodges relative had told him that gasoline had been sprinkled around her body.
The Spartanburg Herald-Journal reported that Bramblett denied any involvement with the deaths of the Hodgeses as he walked out of a bond hearing Wednesday. When confronted with that statement Thursday, Bramblett said he may have said that.
"It was apparent to me that police made an instant decision that I was guilty," he said. "And I understood that, and I still understand that. I just pray to God someone has got some integrity about - I'm going to end this [interview] right now."
Bramblett, who was wearing a blue jail uniform and orange flip-flops but wasn't handcuffed during the interview, slid his chair back and walked toward a door, where he motioned for a guard to take him away.
Staff writer Laurence Hammack contributed to this story.
LENGTH: Long : 118 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN SPEARMAN STAFF Earl Bramblett, in an interviewby CNBroom at the Spartanburg County Jail, discusses the last two years.
color KEYWORDS: ROMUR