1. A Death in Mud Lick 1 A Death in Mud Lick
At sunup, Debbie Preece drove north on the two-lane blacktop that traced the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River, hurtling onto a rutted gravel road that tunneled deep into the woods. She stopped with a jolt at the rust-bitten trailer in Mud Lick. The coroner had already picked up her brother’s body and transported it to the morgue for autopsy. Debbie insisted that someone show her where William “Bull” Preece had spent his last hours. She was directed to a back bedroom, vacant save for a dresser and a torn mattress set atop a box spring. The sheriff’s deputies had already removed the blood-spattered clothes and swept up the residue of crushed pills.

It was the first Monday in October 2005, five years since Bull had fallen from a ladder and injured his back at Penn Coal mine and secured that first prescription for pain pills, which led to another and another. Bull kept finding doctors to prescribe OxyContin and Lortab. He had been taking painkillers for two years before Debbie realized he was addicted. He’d slump into the sofa at her house and fall asleep. She tried to reason with him. She checked him into rehab. He’d stay a few days, then relapse. He lost his home after failing to pay the mortgage. He became a stranger to Debbie. The contents of a pill bottle would transform a once strong and proud coal miner into a coward prowling darkened streets and dive bars for his next fix. He tried to shed the addiction at a methadone clinic. He stopped going after six months. He told his sister he was taking pain medication, but he assured her he wasn’t snorting pills or shooting up.

“Be careful,” she had told him as he was leaving their mother’s house in Kermit, the last time they spoke.

“See you tomorrow,” he said.

After rifling through the single-wide, Debbie stepped outside, her platinum-blond hair afire in the morning sun, her brown eyes, rimmed with red, narrowing to scan the depths of the hollow. At forty-eight, she was three years older than Bull, so nicknamed because he was a bullheaded child.

Debbie noticed a white truck parked beside a shotgun-frame house with a broken porch. It was Bull’s Ford Explorer. She swung open the passenger-side door and retrieved a stack of family photographs—Bull with his thirteen brothers and sisters, Bull with his arm around his father, Bull dressed in a navy firefighter’s uniform and white cap beside the fire truck outside the Kermit VFD.

A man emerged from the house and waved Debbie inside. He wanted to show her something he had discovered in the truck’s glove box. Prescription receipts and four orange plastic prescription bottles. They were empty. Every one of them.

The evening before his death, Bull and his estranged wife and another man had been drinking beer at a honky-tonk called Sweeties Teardrop Inn. They drove back to Mud Lick at 1:00 a.m. that Sunday. Bull fell asleep on the mattress. The man swiped Bull’s truck and drove across the Tug Fork into Kentucky to buy more beer. On the way back, he lost control of the Explorer, ran it up a hill, and slammed into the neighbor’s porch. Someone rushed the man who wrecked Bull’s truck to the hospital in Louisa, Kentucky. He slipped out of the emergency room before the authorities figured things out and tried to arrest him. He got back to the trailer around 1:00 p.m., fell onto a couch, and turned on the television to watch the Cincinnati Bengals game. Bull was still on the mattress in the bedroom. He hadn’t moved. Nobody bothered to wake him.

The recounting of events was unsettling. Debbie rolled the hard plastic bottles in her palm, then gripped them tight. The white labels revealed the missing contents: ninety Valium; sixty oxycodone; ninety OxyContin, an extended-release form of oxycodone; and thirty Zestril tablets. She recognized the drugs. A sedative, painkillers, a blood-pressure medication. She knew the dangers of mixing them. She had attended too many funerals not to know.

She squinted at the labels more closely, the fine print displaying an eleven-digit code, as well as the names of a pharmacy she had frequented dozens of times and a doctor she had known for years. Dr. Donald Kiser had worked at the Wellness Center and the hospital emergency room in Williamson, the Mingo County seat, a twenty-minute drive from her home in Kermit. But he had written Bull’s prescription from his new office in Marietta, Ohio, three hours away. Nothing kept Kiser from practicing in Ohio, even though his lies had cost him his license in West Virginia. In late February 2005, Mingo County deputies had arrested Kiser and charged him with trading prescriptions for sex. The medical board rejected his request for a new license after Kiser marked no to a question about whether he had been charged with a crime during the past two years. Kiser alleged that Mingo authorities had trumped up allegations against him in retaliation for a lawsuit he had filed against them near the end of the previous year. That suit claimed Mingo deputies had falsely arrested him during a child custody dispute with his ex-wife. Debbie didn’t trust Mingo County authorities either. She didn’t discount that Kiser might have been railroaded. She had been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The move to Ohio didn’t slow down Kiser’s business. His Mingo County clientele wouldn’t desert him. Every week or so, a van would pick up Bull and other passengers at stops along the two-lane and shuttle them north to Marietta. The fare was paid in pills—twenty for each prescription filled from each passenger. The drivers, in turn, sold the painkillers on the black market. Kiser arranged the shuttle service. Everyone made a lot of money.

Thirteen days before seeing Kiser, Bull had picked up a prescription for ninety hydrocodone pills for pain and sixty Xanax for anxiety at a recently opened pain clinic in Stonecoal, just north of Kermit, and he had receipts for another 120 hydrocodones and ninety Xanax prescribed there that month by a doctor who had never laid eyes on Bull. That, added to Kiser’s prescriptions, placed six hundred and thirty pills in his hands over the past forty-five days, or nearly three times the recommended dosage for a patient with severe pain—all dispensed by Sav-Rite Pharmacy, the lone drugstore in Kermit. He paid $558 in cash.

Bull’s last prescription was filled on September 29. He’d lumbered into the Sav-Rite on Lincoln Street, and the pharmacy’s owner was there that day. His name was on the storefront sign: JIM WOOLEY’S SAV-RITE PHARMACY. He was sixty-eight now, his beard bushy and white. Wooley was affable, friendly to his customers, always a smile on his face, a people person, a salesman. Bull’s prescription caught Wooley’s attention, but not because it was written by Dr. Kiser at a clinic 170 miles away in Marietta. Wooley not only knew Kiser, but he had recently loaned him $5,000, two days after Kiser was arrested at the pain clinic in Williamson. Everybody knew one another in Mingo County. Bloody Mingo, the locals called it—birthplace of the Hatfield and McCoy feud, the Matewan massacre, a place where mine owners and union workers settled disputes with rifles, but now a place where drug merchants were calling the shots. The pain-addled addicts didn’t stand a chance.

Wooley would claim at a deposition that he didn’t know about Kiser’s troubles with the Mingo County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office and the West Virginia Board of Osteopathic Medicine. Nobody had told Wooley, and, no, he hadn’t read about it in the Williamson Daily News or Mountain Citizen, the newspaper published across the river in Kentucky. What gave Wooley pause about Bull’s prescriptions was the switch from hydrocodone to oxycodone. So he pulled Bull aside and counseled him, right there at the pharmacy, warned him about the change to a stronger painkiller, and not to take the extended and immediate release at the same time, and, whatever you do, don’t chew on the OxyContin. That was his advice. That was it.

Three days later, Bull was dead. He was forty-five. The autopsy report showed he died of oxycodone intoxication. He had five times the lethal limit for the drug in his blood. His death was ruled an accident. Four days before Christmas, the state’s investigation and postmortem for William H. Preece—Case No. WV 2005-1018—was officially closed.

Debbie took the empty prescription bottles home with her and secreted them in an upstairs dresser drawer for safekeeping. She wanted something to hold on to. Bull’s death wouldn’t be forgotten. He wouldn’t be another number, a statistic, in the overdose death toll. Somebody was going to pay, no matter the repercussions, no matter what her enemies and the scandalmongers might dredge up about the past. There would be a reckoning.

Several weeks after they lowered Bull into the ground, the phone rang at Debbie’s house. Dr. Kiser wanted to talk. It was urgent. Was he calling to offer his sympathies? No. He asked Debbie for a copy of Bull’s MRI, the one taken after the ladder fall. Could she send it? The doctor needed something to put in Bull’s empty patient file.

Some things about Bull’s death still troubled Debbie. The bloody clothing, for instance. Could someone have murdered her brother, then tried to cover up the crime by making it look like an overdose? Debbie hadn’t ruled that out. Stranger things had happened in Mingo County. She wanted an appointment to speak to the medical examiner. She wanted to know why the autopsy was taking so long. She kept calling the morgue.

“I want to look at the man who did the autopsy on my brother,” Debbie told the secretary who answered the phone.

After finally receiving a copy of the autopsy report, Debbie hopped in her car and headed north on the four-lane highway to the medical examiner’s office in Charleston. Corridor G, as the route was known, was built for trucks to haul coal out. Debbie wound her way through humps of mountains, their ridges glowing red, orange, and yellow with the change of season. She passed three prisons and two Walmarts during the hour-and-forty-five-minute trip. Her destination, a tan-painted building with barred windows, stood across the street from a NAPA Auto Parts store and the First Advent Christian Church. A receptionist directed Debbie and her questions to Dr. Zia Sabet, the chief deputy at the morgue, the man who conducted Bull’s autopsy. Had he kept blood and DNA samples? Yes. Were there any marks on the body? No. Could her brother have been killed? No marks, no bruises, nothing to suggest someone had attacked Bull, Sabet said. But what about the bloody clothing beside the mattress in the trailer? She had seen evidence photos taken by the sheriff. Sabet told her he did not have the clothing.

Debbie had questioned everything about her brother’s death. His Explorer had been taken for a joyride. Someone had stolen Bull’s gold necklace and the pills left in his prescription bottles after he died. Why did his so-called friends let Bull lie passed out in the trailer so long? Why did it take them so long to call the sheriff? She was told someone hid her brother’s pill bottles in a stack of cinder blocks while the ambulance made its way to the trailer. They later partied with Bull’s remaining pain medications, she heard.

“I suspicioned everything when those things were missing,” Debbie said.

“Your brother died of an overdose,” Sabet told her.

There was also the pill residue—and an empty bottle of Lortab that belonged to the trailer’s owner.

“My brother did not snort pills. When you crush them, that’s what you crush them for.”

“How do you know your brother didn’t do that?” Sabet asked.

“Because he told me he didn’t.”

And she believed Bull. He had always been a man of his word, hooked but honest.

After Bull’s funeral, Dr. Kiser was frantic. For weeks that autumn of 2005, he kept calling Debbie, asking whether her dead brother had ever had an MRI and offering to pay for the film. In fact, Bull did have one. It was in a big brown envelope stored upstairs beside the prescription bottles. But why on earth would the doctor need the scan? Kiser had an explanation: He admitted to Debbie that he had no justifiable reason for prescribing OxyContin to Bull, and the authorities—Kiser wouldn’t identify them by name or agency—were starting to ask questions about Bull’s death.

Debbie was helping to care for an elderly man on kidney dialysis, and she still thought Kiser was a respectable doctor. She would call him for instructions about what color of dialysis bag to administer based on the man’s blood work. Balancing the chemical levels wasn’t easy. She respected Kiser’s medical advice and appreciated his help. He didn’t ask for anything in return. Even when Debbie heard about the charges against Kiser in February 2005, the news didn’t change her opinion.

“They’re saying they’re going to indict me over your brother’s death,” Kiser told Debbie.

Kiser was hatching a cover-up for Bull’s death, and somehow he had convinced Debbie to take part. At first, Debbie thought she was doing the right thing. She wanted to help Kiser. He had always helped her. They kept talking on the phone, never in person. Then one Sunday in November 2005, Kiser’s girlfriend showed up at Debbie’s house. Debbie handed her the brown envelope with Bull’s MRI tucked inside. She never looked at it. She couldn’t remember where or when it had been taken—probably at the hospital emergency room in Louisa, after the mine accident.

And now that her brother was dead, she was giving it up, just like that, a willing accomplice. She watched Kiser’s girlfriend—Debbie’s former sister-in-law—drop the envelope in the trunk of her car, close the hood, and drive away to Kiser’s new office in Ohio.

Weeks later, Debbie started having second thoughts. Everyone knew Kiser was writing prescriptions for pain pills. Why else would vanloads of addicts travel three hours to see him? She was helping the doctor who had written the prescription that killed her brother. Had she lost her mind? Had she forgotten her promise? Finally, she picked up the phone and called the Mingo County sheriff and then the prosecutor.

“I’ve done something I probably shouldn’t have done,” she confessed.