Despite spending the summer listening to stories of horrific crimes, one man found hope amid the tragedy of anti-gay hate crimes

Over the summer, Brite Divinity School Associate Professor Steven V. Sprinkle traveled the country to talk with friends and family members of gays and lesbians killed in anti-gay hate crimes for a book he is writing. Some of the murder victims included in the book will be, clockwise from top left, Billy Jack Gaither of Alabama, Kenneth Cummings Jr. of Texas, Talana Kreeger of North Carolina, Scotty Joe Weaver of Alabama and Ryan Skipper of Florida.

Editor’s note: The following is a firsthand account of the author’s summer travels researching a book he is writing on anti-gay hate crimes. It is published here as part of Dallas Voice’s month-long series on anti-gay hate crimes in Texas.

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The duties of a seminary professor are usually quiet pursuits, studying and preparing for another academic year.

Summer and fall 2008 have been anything but that for me. In fact, my travel from June through September and research into anti-LGBT hate crimes murders have been face-to-face encounters with the effects of great evil and the power of great good. I found hope, not hate in the stories of gay lives cut short by prejudice, ignorance, and fear.

For three years, as time has permitted, I have traveled to the sites where LGBT people have died by violence. To gather the stories for my upcoming book, “Unfinished Lives: Reviving the Memories of LGBT Hate Crimes Murder Victims,” I have spent months on the road meeting the family members, friends and lovers, co-workers and classmates, law enforcement officers and activists — anyone who could shed light on the lives and deaths of 25 representative LGBT people across America murdered because of their sexual orientation.

This time, I went to Missouri, Oklahoma, the Texas Gulf Coast, northern and southern Alabama, central Florida and coastal North Carolina, pushing my old Buick LeSabre to the limit in search of what we have lost in the deaths of our people.

After a short visit to Kansas City to research the murder of Pfc. Barry Winchell, whose story is immortalized in the film, “Soldier’s Girl,” and a weekend in southern Oklahoma studying the Aryan Nation murder of Steven Domer, I spent a week in metro Houston learning about Ken Cummings, Jr., the 46-year-old Southwest Airlines flight attendant savagely killed by Terry Mark Mangum.

For Pride week in June, I preached and presented my work to Resurrection Metropolitan Community Church in Houston. I consulted with gay and trans members of the Houston Police Department, and sought out Cummings’ best friend, David Kirtley.

Kirtley was among the first to miss Cummings in June 2007, and he later joined Texas Equusearch in rural Poteet, where he was the first to find a bone jutting out of the side of a dry stock tank that proved to be his best friend’s knee.

Mangum, a religiously motivated killer, had stalked Cummings in the Montrose gay bars and enticed Cummings into inviting him to his Pearland home for the night. Mangum, saying God appointed him to kill, mutilated Cummings for hours, and then burned the corpse beyond recognition on his 90-year-old grandfather’s ranch south of San Antonio.

Kirtley testified at the trial that found Mangum guilty of murder.

In Bossier City, La., I interviewed the Rev. Andy Harris, Cummings’ college roommate, who gave me insight into the difficulty his friend had with family and friends over his orientation, and the freedom he found flying with Southwest. I stood at Cumming’s grave in Webster, Texas, wondering at how religion both blessed and cursed this gentle Texan with the easy laugh.

Billy Jack Gaither’s remains were burned, too, on a pyre made out of kerosene-soaked tires on the banks of Peckerwood Creek, a nearly-inaccessible area in far northern Coosa County, Ala., in February 1999.

Gaither was murdered by Steven Eric Mullins, a skinhead wannabe, and his sidekick, “Charlesy” Butler Jr. They stabbed him with a knife, and then fatally beat him with an ax handle. Both are serving lengthy sentences now.

Kathy Joe Gaither, Billy’s lesbian sister, is the keeper of the flame of his memory, and I met her in her tiny apartment in central Alabama where she lives with her beloved Chihuahua, Pablo. Confined these days to a scooter chair and hooked up to an oxygen bottle, she opened her heart about the toll hate crime took on her family.

Billy Jack Gaither was the Southern son who stayed home to take care of ailing parents. He was well-liked in Sylacauga, and a valued employee of Russell Athletic Wear in Alexander City.

The Gaithers are still devastated by the loss. Kathy Joe and I became fast friends, and still correspond regularly.

“You know,” she told me as I left, “Billy’s still with us, no matter what. You get him into you, and you cannot get him out.”

Scotty Joe Weaver, who lived in rural Baldwin County, Ala., on Mobile Bay, had survived cancer and the untimely death of his father. It was hell being gay in south Alabama. He was harassed and threatened almost daily in school, and dropped out of high school because it just wasn’t safe.

At 18, Weaver became a short-order cook for the Bay Minette Waffle House, where he made enough money to rent his own trailer and to buy stylish costumes for himself when he impersonated Dolly Parton. In nearby Pensacola, Fla., Scotty Joe won second place in the weekly Drag-o-rama singing “I Will Always Love You.”

His school friends Nicole Kelsay and Chris Gaines, were unemployed lovers with an infant son who had no place else to go. So Scotty opened his home to them Gaines shortly brought along a friend of his, Robert Porter, to live there, too.

Behind his back, the trio hated Weaver because he was gay. They plotted for two weeks to kill him. On July 18, 2004, they ambushed him as he slept.

According to District Attorney David Whetstone, who is the only person keeping Weaver’s story alive, “They hated him with a perfect hate.”

The three choked Weaver with a nylon rope, carved the letter “H” into his cheek for “Homo,” mutilated him for hours and then partially decapitated him.

Driving his body into the woods, they soaked his corpse with gas, urinated on him and set his remains afire.

Then, in a revealing callousness, they returned the unused rope to the store, got back 77 cents, and bought themselves a Slurpee.

Whetstone, who is the most remarkable law enforcement official I have ever met, wants the world to know what they did to Weaver, whose story is in danger of being forgotten because his family has withdrawn, and because LGBT people in Mobile have gone on about their lives.

Gaines and Porter are serving life sentences, and Kelsay is serving 20 years in prison. So many lives ruined by hate!

Of all the stories I researched, this is the most outrageous and the saddest. Weaver’s lonely grave is off the beaten track in Perdido, in the furthest section of a country cemetery.

Ryan Keith Skipper, 26, was so full of life and love. He and two girlfriends had rented a little red house in rural Wahneta, Fla. I met his friends, and they cried as they remembered their “Keeper of Hearts.” So did his bereaved lover, Carl, who worked with him at Macy’s in Lakeland.

Skipper’s mother and stepfather, Pat and Lynn Mulder, opened their home and took days off to show me the places and introduce me to the people dearest to their son.

William Brown and Joseph Bearden have been accused of tricking Skipper into giving them a ride down desolate Morgan Road before stabbing him 20 times, cutting his throat, throwing his body in a ditch. They drove his car around and bragged about smearing a queer, and were quickly apprehended after unsuccessfully trying to set the car afire at a public boat ramp on Lake Pansy.

How Skipper’s story was reported to the media is sadly typical. The sheriff of Polk County, Fla., Grady Judd, reassured the Mulders that he would see justice done, while at the same time suggesting to reporters allegations of drug dealing and sexual misconduct that were totally fabricated to cast doubt on the victim’s character.

Skipper’s parents are bravely fighting back to repair their son’s reputation, but the fight is uphill. Pat and Lynn Mulder are brave and selfless, and have become incessant advocates for LGBT rights in Florida and throughout the country. They visit their son’s grave often, rearranging flowers and noting the little gifts people leave.

Skipper’s accused killers are set to go on trial in January 2009.

My last trip was to Wilmington, N.C,. to research the murder of lesbian carpenter Talana Kreeger, 32, who was brutally disemboweled and left to die in February 1990 by Ronald Thomas, a long-haul trucker who wanted to “turn a dyke.”

Kreeger was a survivor who had lived a hard life, who loved the outdoors and her many pets, and who had become a familiar member of the group of women who frequented the Park View Bar and Grill on Carolina Beach Avenue. She was voluntarily remodeling the bar for the owner, a woman she was involved with.

Her murder was so brutal it shocked the port city and its closeted gay community awake. No church in town would hold her memorial service, so gays and lesbians vowed that they would start a church of their own. St. Jude’s MCC, where the Rev. Amanda McCullough is pastor now, is the church born out of Kreeger’s tragedy.

Tab Ballis, a social worker and independent filmmaker, is completing “Park View” (www.parkviewproject.com), a powerful documentary on Kreeger’s death and its aftermath.

Thomas, who manually disemboweled Kreeger in the cab of his truck, avoided the death penalty and is serving back-to-back life sentences for rape and murder.

In every story, I found horror and hope. The hope is the more powerful. My profession is teaching, but these dead LGBT people have strangely become my teachers. Through them I have met wonderful parents, sisters and brothers, like the Gaithers and the Mulders.

Remarkable public servants and advocates have tenaciously refused to let these stories die, like David Whetstone and Tab Ballis. Ministers like Amanda McCullough care for the brokenhearted and point them to healing.

People want to talk, I learned, if someone will listen.

Every time the stories of the dead are recounted, the LGBT community gets stronger, a counterintuitive learning of mine for the summer. My book is being written, and I hope to have it done early next year. See my blog in support of the book, www.unfinishedlives.wordpress.com.

Ten years after Matthew Shepard, these stories, and the memories of these fallen LGBT people are being told and revived. There is much reason in that to hope for a better, more just world for us all.

Stephen V. Sprinkle is an associate professor at Texas Christian University’s Brite Divinity School in Fort Worth and the director of the Unfinished Lives Project.


This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition October 17, 2008.