‘Shakespearean twist.’ Key members of ‘Bluegrass Conspiracy’ died within days of each other.

In a world of Vegas odds, it would have been impossible to predict that Henry Vance and Bill Canan would shuffle off the mortal coil just days apart. Lying at rest in the same Lexington funeral home, the two are now forever linked in death as in life. Judging by their obituaries, they lived out their post-penitentiary lives in an exceedingly forgiving community that didn’t give their infamy a second thought.

Vance was eulogized as a “yellow dog” Democrat and upstanding civic leader, while Canan was honored as a decorated Vietnam War veteran and granted a full military burial. Neither of their obituaries mentioned their criminal convictions and lengthy federal prison sentences.

I haven’t been a journalist in Kentucky for a long time, but I can still remember what they were suspected of and charged with back in the early 1980s when I was the investigative reporter for WKYT TV. As I reported exclusively during that time, Vance, a former Fayette County deputy sheriff and top aide to former Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll, conspired with a Lexington woman to kill a state attorney. He would be convicted in federal court in Ashland, Kentucky in 1987 on charges of interstate racketeering and furnishing the murder weapon in the shooting of Florida prosecutor Eugene Berry, and sentenced to 15 years.

For his part, Canan, a former Lexington Police department narcotics officer, was trafficking in drugs, and in 1993 would be charged with possession and intent to distribute cocaine and obstruction of justice for his threats to kill witnesses against him. He would be sentenced to 17 years and eight months. Both men would serve the majority of their sentences and then return to Lexington upon their release.

Canan was also linked to, but never charged with, the disappearance of Melanie Flynn—the 24-year old Lexington woman whose disappearance in January 1977 remains one of Lexington’s most enduring mysteries. Flynn worked for Canan as an undercover informant, and a fellow police officer once testified that Canan admitted killing Flynn. When I reported these and numerous other related stories, the famous Lexington socialite Anita Madden picketed the television station, accusing me of what would today be called “fake news” and demanding my termination.

I left Kentucky in 1983 and developed what I had uncovered during my three-year stint there into the book “The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder,” published by Doubleday in 1989. I pulled together many seemingly disparate Kentucky characters and exposed their good-ole-boy network of criminality. Chief among them were Vance and Canan.

Several months ago I read with keen interest about a new search being conducted by Lexington police for the remains of the once young and beautiful Flynn. The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that police were relying on information provided by an “elderly” person who wanted “to get this off their chest.” I am left to wonder whether either Vance or Canan was the whisperer. I suppose we will never know. But in yet another Shakespearean twist, Canan will be buried at Camp Nelson National Cemetery—not far from the Jessamine County site where police searched for Flynn’s body last summer.

Sally Denton is the author of “The Bluegrass Conspiracy and numerous other books. She has received the Investigative Reporters and Editors “Best Investigative Book,” and her books have been named “Editors’ Choice”and “Notable Book” by the New York Times.