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Even today, the case causes anger and pain
Journal Graphic by Nicholas Weir
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Published: July 13, 2008
Four yellow concrete pillars rise from the roadside weeds along Old Salisbury Road as fading markers for one of Winston-Salem's most infamous crimes.
Twenty years have passed since Michael Hayes stepped out of his mo-ped shop, onto the road and began doing what he thought was God's work -- killing demons.
He took four lives that night, shooting some from a distance and others after waving down their cars. He injured five others before a deputy stopped him with two shotgun blasts.
A jury found Hayes not guilty by reason of insanity, a verdict supported by mental-health experts who have analyzed him but one that appalled victims and their families.
"I do not accept that verdict," said Linda Cantrell, whose daughter Crystal died in Hayes' shooting spree on July 17, 1988. "I didn't accept it that day, and I don't now and I never will."
The case led voters to kick Sheriff Preston Oldham out of office in 1990. District Attorney Warren Sparrow also lost his bid for re-election that year. It led to changes in state and federal law. It also sparked enduring anger and grief for the victims' families and the survivors.
In the years since, some have tried to distance themselves from what happened along that road. Others have made it their life's work to seek some amount of justice in a case in which they feel justice is hard to come by.
"Someone's gotta do it because the state didn't … the state didn't punish him," said R.B. Nicholson, whose son, Tom, 24, was killed by Hayes. "It's as simple as that.
"If we could have a referendum in Forsyth County, the vast majority of people would vote to crucify him any way they could."
After the shootings, Nicholson stenciled the names of the dead onto the pillars, which stand at the intersection of Old Salisbury Road and Friedberg Church Road to mark a water main.
The names have faded now, as the dull marigold paint flecks off and fades at the edges.
Thursday at dusk, a crowd of survivors, victims' families, neighbors and law-enforcement officers touched by the case will gather by the pillars, put luminaries atop them and pray in the flickering light.
Nicholson's room little changed
Not much has changed in Tom Nicholson's room at his parents' home.
A hot-rod and bikini-girl calendar hangs on the wall. So does an ad for Red Man, his favorite chewing tobacco. On one nightstand is a football trophy from 1976. On another, in a red heart-shaped frame, is a photo of Bobbie Jo Eddleman, his fiancee. She is married and keeps in touch with the Nicholsons, who think of her as a daughter-in-law.
As R.B. Nicholson has kept his son's memory alive at home, he has kept the pressure on Hayes and his attorneys and become a gadfly to the system that acquitted Hayes.
He won a civil lawsuit finding Hayes liable for the deaths. The judgment was for $2 million, plus interest, though no one expects Hayes will ever be able to pay it.
Nicholson uses the judgment to keep track of Hayes and to needle Hayes and his attorney, Karl Knudsen. The judgment lets Nicholson seize Hayes' assets and keep track of his privileges at Dorothea Dix, the psychiatric hospital in Raleigh where he has been held since his acquittal.
Prodded by Nicholson and other family members of victims, state legislators strengthened laws to make it harder for Hayes to get out of Dix.
Congress cut Social Security payments to those found not guilty by reason of insanity, after learning from Nicholson that Hayes was getting monthly checks and using them to buy music records and electronics.
Knudsen has called such changes an unconstitutional attempt to punish Hayes after a verdict has already been reached.
Nicholson started writing a book soon after the verdict and self-published it last year. It re-creates in painstaking detail what he believes was Hayes' conning a jury out of justice.
Miki Felsenburg, an associate professor at Wake Forest University's School of Law, studied the Hayes case while she attended law school at Wake from 1988 to 1991. She and Nicholson are old friends from their time working together at Western Electric.
She concluded that the right verdict was reached and that the state's insanity laws were not broken.
But she also understands the feeling that Hayes should be punished because the community demands it.
That's not how our society has set up its justice system -- a jury applies the law of the state, not the law of public opinion, Felsenburg said.
"We don't want our system to be about revenge, we want it to be about justice," she said. "I would probably feel exactly like he does if it was my kid. I don't think you ever get over the anger. He is angry and he's understandably angry."
Taking a different road
Darlene Atwood, who was wounded by Hayes, has taken a different road away from what happened at the intersection of Old Salisbury and Friedberg Church roads. Her then-husband, Ronald Hull, was killed by Hayes. She has since remarried.
Atwood never returns there -- not for vigils, not to stop to see the markers, or to get gas at a station she drives past on the way to visit her sister.
"Even though the scenery has changed, a lot of it has changed, you still have flashbacks," she said.
The area, once rural, now is home to pharmacies, housing developments and a landfill in the place of the mo-ped shop Hayes ran.
Hayes stepped out of the shop that night in 1988 and shot at passing cars for about a half-hour. The Hulls were the last of his victims. When they drove onto Old Salisbury Road, deputies had been on the scene for at least 15 minutes but hadn't blocked off the area from all sides.
Hayes waved the Hulls down and, when they slowed, pointed his .22-caliber rifle at Ronald Hull. He told him to roll the window down, then shot him.
He shot Atwood through her left shoulder and chest, and the bullet lodged in her right arm.
Then he pointed the rifle at the Hulls' son 8-year-old son, Adam. Deputies shot Hayes before he could pull the trigger.
"Adam remembers it all," Atwood said. "He remembers poking his daddy in the face, trying to get his daddy to say something."
Adam Hull now makes windows for a company in Welcome and is a part-time real-estate agent, Atwood said.
The bullet is still in Atwood's arm, left there because it was helping hold the surrounding bones together. It doesn't hurt, she said, but on an X-ray, silver-colored flecks mark the bullet's path.
Given the memories, the decision to stay away from Old Salisbury is easy, Atwood said.
"I lived it, I stood on that ground, I laid on that road.… I've seen it, I felt it, I've still got the scars, I've still got the bullet," she said. "And that's just not a place that I choose to visit."
Pain reminds him of Hayes
Claude Eagle hasn't kept up with vigils marking the shooting spree that nearly killed him. He pays attention to the news when Hayes asks to be let out from Dix but he doesn't attend hearings.
But when his head starts to ache, when the burning traces a path from his left eye to the back of his head, he thinks of Michael Hayes.
Eagle was driving home from a movie date that night, when he came across Hayes walking by the road.
He didn't see the gun until it was too late. As Hayes stuck the barrel in Eagle's face, Eagle grabbed at it and it went off.
The bullet entered the left side of his head above his ear, then traced a path around the edge of his skull and came out. Eagle drove himself to Forsyth Memorial Hospital, using his thumb and pinkie finger to plug the holes.
"I didn't even have a chance to say, ‘Hey, how are you, or nothing,'" Eagle said. "I was just going to ask him if he needed me to call someone. I probably would've given him a ride, you know?"
The bullet has left Eagle with occasional headaches and problems with his short-term memory. Every forgotten detail is a reminder of Hayes.
"Every time I get a headache, or I'm sitting around trying to remember something … I feel angry," Eagle said. "I know where it's coming from."
Cantrell's room was kept intact
Crystal Cantrell was the youngest of Hayes' victims and the first to die.
She was driving home that night from her boyfriend's house, where she was celebrating being named an all-state softball player.
Linda Cantrell kept her daughter's room intact until the family moved eight years ago.
"I have her memories," Cantrell said. "I know the good times we had, I even know the little arguments that we had, and getting onto her -- that's part of being a mother, and a daughter -- and telling her what time to be home and when she can go, when she's can't ... I have all that right here, in my heart."
The Cantrells dread each July. The same month of their wedding anniversary and the birthday of Tracy, one of Crystal's older sisters, also has their darkest day.
"It's the day that your life just fell apart, your world fell apart as you knew it the day before that, or that morning," Cantrell said. "Things changed real quick and you have to learn to adjust your life, I guess you say, to those circumstances, and you can either think about what happened, you dwell on that, or you can start remembering the good times."
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com.
Another Year: Little has changed for Hayes
Last fall, Michael Hayes made his latest failed attempt to convince a judge that he was no longer a danger to others.
Nine psychologists or psychiatrists testified that he is no longer a danger to others and does not have any mental illness. One testifying for the state said that he still had some personality problems but could be released under certain conditions.
A judge ordered Hayes committed for another year, in what victims' families said appeared to be the closest he's come to getting out. Karl Knudsen, Hayes' attorney, and David Sipprell, a prosecutor, have tentatively agreed to have this year's hearing at the end of August.
Since Hayes has been committed, he has fathered two children, divorced his first wife and mourned his second wife, who committed suicide.
He is estranged from another son, the one his first wife was pregnant with when she left him in July 1988, after he began behaving erratically.
Little has changed in Hayes' life in the past year, Knudsen said in a recent interview.
Hayes has passes so that he can work off the Dix campus and can visit his girlfriend and their two children for up to seven nights at a time.
"He continues to be marvelously well and doesn't need to be in the hospital," Knudsen said. Hayes declined an interview request made through Knudsen for this story.
"He says, ‘Thanks,' but he's already said everything there is to say from the witness stand, under oath -- how sorry he is and how he thinks about it every day and how he tries to prove himself as a person and tries to make amends," Knudsen said.
■ Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.
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