"She had puncture wounds on her neck and bruising on her face. Antibacterial hand lotion had been put inside her vagina, squirted in her purse, and also smeared on the e_SDHpdoorknob. The purple can of hair spray that had been washed into the hall had been used as an accelerant. She had been sprayed with it, specifically on her breast and genital region, and then set on fire. The smoke alarm had been ripped from the ceiling and her afghan was tied around the sprinkler head like a makeshift e_SDHptourniquet. The door to her room had been locked from the outside with her own key." — from Bluegrass: A True Story of Murder in Kentucky by William Van Meter (Simon & Schuster, 240 pp., $24)
William Van Meter saw a lot of telling things about Kentucky life in the 2003 murder of Katie Autry: class, race, religion, sex, rugged landscape and trashy behavior.
Van Meter, a Kentuckian now living in Brooklyn, N.Y., was fascinated by Autry's case: an 18-year-old Western Kentucky University student who was raped, stabbed, sprayed with hair spray and set on fire in her Bowling Green dorm room on May 4, 2003.
It was more than a whodunit, Van Meter figured. It was an interlocking series of mysteries about how a young woman could be so vulnerable to attack, why someone would violate her so brutally, and how hard it would be to prove who was responsible.
Ultimately, the Autry case was about how even with a confession, an entire region of Kentucky could divide on who was really responsible for Autry's awful death.
"These kind of gruesome crimes will attract people because it was like this e_SDHphorror show," Van Meter says about the writing of his book. But "once you got closer to it and the people, it got more complex and affecting and real."
Even now, debate rages about the case: how well evidence was investigated, how thoroughly interrogations were conducted, whether an influential family drove a not-guilty verdict for one of the two young men connected with the case. Did Stephen Soules, then 20, act alone? Was Lucas Goodrum, then 21, another young man adrift in the little towns around Bowling Green, more involved than was ever proven?
The differences were glaringly obvious: Soules was mixed-race and poor. Goodrum, although nobody's idea of an ambitious young executive, had an impressive pedigree. Goodrum was connected by his mother's second marriage to "the richest and most well-known family in Scottsville, the Turners," the family behind the Dollar General retail chain — which Van Meter terms, hilariously, "essentially a less-discerning Kmart."
Was Goodrum, whom Van Meter calls "Kentucky's most famous murder suspect of the decade," the real mastermind of Autry's demise? Will the circumstances of Autry's death always be a mystery?
Soules, of Scottsville, pleaded guilty to raping, sodomizing and killing Autry. Goodrum, also of Scottsville, was acquitted in March 2005 of rape and murder charges.
And although Autry was buried, the debate never died.
"Stephen Soules was about 5 feet, 9 inches tall and skinny with tan skin. His father was black and his mother was white — he could be mistaken for various different races. A lot of his friends and family called him 'Guido' because he 'looked like a Mexican.' The misnomer stuck.
"When Stephen was younger, he had dreams of becoming a star basketball player or a famous rapper. But these adolescent reveries had dwindled down to a sluggish existence wholly in the present — a life structured around 'chillin'.' ...
"Stephen's mooching could be both trying and expensive. He didn't have a car and bummed rides. He didn't have a cell phone so he always used everyone else's. Nor did he have a job or even the prospects for employment. Stephen had dropped out of high school and was now 20 years old with a ninth-grade education. ...
"Although the jury found Lucas Goodrum innocent, the verdict did little if anything to sway the cemented opinion of most Bowling Green and Scottsville residents. This isn't altogether surprising. The public had been conditioned daily for years that Luke was indeed a murderer. His prior history of violence was well documented and broadcast — the jury might not have fully heard about his past, but the public devoured it tenfold."
After Goodrum was acquitted, doubt lingered about his involvement in Autry's gruesome death. "Some of us felt in our hearts that he was guilty, but there was no way to prove it," juror David Austin said.
Soules, after pleading guilty to murder, rape, sodomy and arson, was sentenced in May 2005 to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Van Meter takes a dim view of Soules. "Even in pleading guilty, he didn't plead guilty," he writes. "He's never truly taken responsibility for what he did."
Bluegrass: A True Story of Murder in Kentucky is also about Bowling Green, a college town that has developed a strong international flavor. "Growing up there it was just a town of black and white," Van Meter says. "It was just pastures and cows and fields. And now it's a real multicultural place."
To what extent that international culture figured into Autry's demise is debatable.
Autry was a small-town girl from Hancock County with a chaotic family life who worked at a strip club and liked to party. But making youthful mistakes is never a justification for the kind of violence inflicted on her. Van Meter's book raises, again, the thorniest question of the Autry saga:
At what point did a sexual encounter turn into one of the most brutal slayings in Kentucky history?
Says Van Meter: "There will always be a mystery."
