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“Little Boar was ignorant and knew it but buried his own shame by always belittling Lydia,” Jones told us. “Got worse after she had Thierry, who they called Baby Boar.”
Addicted to his own rotgut hooch, Thierry’s father became increasingly violent as his son grew up and revealed himself to be as bookish and smart as his mother. Little Boar put Lydia in the ER at St. John’s Hospital on a number of occasions, once with a fractured arm, another time with a fractured jaw. Twice, Lydia brought Thierry into the same ER. His father had seen fault with how Baby Boar had done his chores and beat him with a barber’s shaving strop.
“No one arrested the guy?” Ava said.
“Those were sadly different times, young lady,” the detective said. “And from what I know, kids teased Thierry unmercifully as a child. They called him Pig Boy and would taunt him with ‘Sooooweeee’ and ‘Here, piggy, piggy!’”
When Thierry was thirteen, his mother met a mining engineer, someone from Montana or Oklahoma, and they had an affair. Without a word to her husband or son, Lydia left the family, took off with the engineer, and was never seen around Buckhannon again.
Everyone knew. People laughed behind Thierry’s father’s back, which made him get drunker, angrier, and even more reclusive. School became the boy’s refuge, the only place he could go to escape his father’s wrath.
“Smart boy, that Thierry,” Jones said. “Real smart. And that was the shame of it all, what I think led to the killing.”
Thierry wanted to go to college. Little Boar laughed at his son, told Baby Boar he would spend his life just like his father, tending to the hogs, but maybe Thierry could use his chemistry-class skills to make better moonshine. The farm had more than a hundred pigs on it, but Thierry’s father said there was no money for something as useless as school.
The summer before what would have been Thierry’s senior year, his father ordered him to quit high school, said it was a waste of time and he wouldn’t stand for it. Right around then, a lawyer showed up in Hog Hollow with an offer to buy the Mulch property.
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Little Boar owned twenty-six hundred acres, seventeen hundred of them barely tillable in the rocky bottom of the hollow and the rest considered worthless for generations, a steep, rocky ridge covered in hornpout hickory and other trash trees. Given that assessment of the property, the lawyer’s offer was more than generous, in the high six figures. Little Boar refused to sell, said Hog Hollow and Pig Lick Mountain were sacred ground to the Mulch family and would always stay that way.
A month later, the offer was doubled, and Thierry’s father refused again. The offer was tripled the month after that, and a drunken Little Boar pointed a double-barreled twelve-gauge at the attorney and told him to get off his property and never come back.
Jones took a sip, gestured toward the hollow, and said, “So it’s October first now, and school’s on in Buckhannon, and Thierry’s not there. About eight in the morning, I get a call from the sheriff. Thierry had just called in hysterical, said his father had fallen in with the hogs sometime during the night and they’d eaten most of him.”
CHAPTER
32
FOR A SECOND I almost didn’t believe my own ears, and then I said, “It’s him, then. No doubt now.”
I explained about Preston Elliot’s skull and femur found at the commercial pig operation in Virginia.
“It is him,” Jones crowed and slapped his thigh. “I knew it! When I got down to that farm about two hours later, I knew Thierry had killed his old man. I could just feel it; something about the way he moved when he showed me to the feedlot that the deputies had cleared. It was like he’d been relieved of some heavy burden.”
When he got to the pigsty, Jones saw that most of Little Boar’s flesh had been consumed already. Thierry showed little emotion, just gave this blank stare at what was left of his father. He told Jones that Little Boar had been drinking the evening before. The boy said that he did what he always did when his father was into his second jar of moonshine: he went to his room, locked the door, and read a book.
“Aristotle,” Jones said. “He was reading Aristotle.”
Thierry claimed he’d been deep into Nicomachean Ethics, reading about how man can best lead a good life, and had turned off his light around eleven. An hour later, he was roused by the pigs squealing, but that wasn’t unusual. There were all sorts of turf battles in the sties. You just got used to it. Thierry said his drunken father must have gone out to see about the ruckus and fallen in.
“I told Thierry that he didn’t seem too shook up about his daddy’s death,” the old detective recalled. “He said, ‘I hated the sonofabitch, but even I wouldn’t have wanted him to die that way.’”
That was Thierry’s line and attitude during the entire investigation. Jones said he searched Thierry’s room and found Aristotle on the table but also Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, the story of a man who murders someone he thinks no one will miss.
Jones asked him about it, and Thierry shrugged, said he hadn’t cracked it yet but that it was a requirement for honors English. Though his father had forced him to leave school, he’d been keeping up with the requirements.
The old detective said he tried every way he could to rattle the boy’s story, but Baby Boar never wavered. Young Mulch had admitted readily that he’d thought about killing his father. Who wouldn’t? The man was sadistic and in many ways deserved to die. And Thierry said that maybe someday, if it had come to it, he would have killed his father. But this was an accident, an act of God, and as fitting an ending as there could be for the man—eaten by his own hogs.
Jones said, “Autopsy showed a hairline fracture of Little Boar’s skull, but the hogs gnawed and hooved on it so hard the ME couldn’t say what had caused it.”
Soon after, the old detective learned of the offers to buy the Mulch land. He pressed Thierry on that angle too. But young Mulch said the offers were news to him. Little Boar had never confided in him about anything.
Four months later, however, Thierry turned eighteen, and as the sole heir to the Mulch land, he signed a contract selling the property to the Crossfield Mining Company for $5.5 million. Turned out the worthless mountain was made almost entirely of coal.
When Jones pressed Thierry about the sale, Little Boar’s son replied that he had no intention of being a pig farmer and that the sale was the practical thing to do, a way out, another act of God.
“He knew I didn’t believe him,” Jones said, shifting in his seat and adjusting the nose clip of his oxygen line. “He knew I was going to stay after him until I figured out a way to trip him up.”
