Jeffery Scott McFry, 23 MSG Since Since 09/90 From Piedmont, AL

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Jeffery Scott McFry

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Status: Missing
Date of Birth: 6-25-1967
Race: White
Sex: Male
Height: 5' 10"
Hair: Brown
Eyes: Blue
Weight: 150 lbs.
Scars, Marks, Tattoos:
County: Calhoun
Last Seen: September 1990. Photo taken 1/10/87

Contact:
Calhoun County Sheriffs Office at (1-256-236-6600).

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Missing Slaughtered for their mistakes
Paul Sloan
Published: April 14, 1991

PIEDMONT — A clearly distraught Ella Mae McFry stares out from the corner of the sofa. She listens to the conversation, but offers only an occasional
word. She responds in nods, raised eyebrows, sometimes a smile. ''You see,'' explains Mrs. McFry's niece, Dolores, sitting beside the small-framed woman. ''She really can't think, you know. She just has to live in another world.''

What Mrs. McFry struggles not to think about is something relatives, friends, and law enforcement reluctantly admit: Her son, Jeffery Scott McFry, last seen Sept. 5, is dead. Murdered at age 24, it is believed, for stealing marijuana from the wrong man — David Ronald Chandler, the drug kingpin sentenced to death two weeks ago for ordering the killing of a police informant last May. Among other charges, Chandler was convicted for the disappearance of McFry and another so-called marijuana ''poacher,'' 23-year-old Patrick Burrows, last seen Aug. 23.

''If I knew beyond a reasonable doubt that Chandler was responsible,'' says Burrows' father, James, leaning forward and pointing his filterless Camel into the air. ''I'd like to be the one to pull the switch.''

''These boys were so young,'' says Dolores, who requested her last name not be published. ''They were at a turning point in their lives, just fixing to live. They didn't know who they were fooling with.

''Slaughtered for their mistakes,'' she says, tearfully. Anger is an emotion that only occasionally creeps into the faces and voices of these young men's relatives these days. As reality set in last fall, they admit, they were furious. But they describe seven months of extreme frustration. Scores of phone calls offering fruitless leads. Treks through the woods that turned up, at best,
the bones of a dog, once a tattered T-shirt.

And always pain.

Now, with Chandler sentenced, they fear interest in their missing loved ones will become memory. ''We really are concerned that this is cut and dry,'' says Dolores. ''We just pray that this will not die.''

''J.T. Chandler (Ronald's father) was madder than hell,'' adds Burrows, referring to Chandler's reaction to the jury's death verdict. ''But atleast he knows where his son is.''

Above all, these families want to know what happened — ''let us at least give them a Christian burial,'' they say often. Yet, after months of searching, and the convictions of 15 men linked to the Chandler drug ring, little is known of Burrows' and McFry's whereabouts.

Patrick Burrows' disappearance — he was last seen driving a Honda 250 motorcycle on Alabama 21 near the Midway community — sparked much of the investigation that tied murder to Chandler's marijuana business.

But aside from one convicted marijuana conspirator's testimony that Chandler said he was tired of Burrows ''taking food from his kids'' and that ''Patrick wouldn't be around these parts no more,'' investigators have had few leads.

''It's like he just vanished,'' says one searcher.

Still, the senior Burrows won't give up. The isolated trailer home Burrows shared with his son before he ''went missing'' — the eerie phrase that has become commonplace around these parts — has gone through some changes.

The front porch light stays on each night. A seven-month-old police scanner crackles constantly in the living room. And Burrows circled the property with a $3,000 fence to prevent his son's remaining dog from running off, as many of the other dogs have done.

He continues to talk to the Calhoun County sheriff's investigator Max Kirby at least once a week, exchanging the latest rumors.

''Still got that smidgen of hope,'' he says.

When Jeffery McFry vanished, he was alone at his mother's trailer home. It was a Wednesday evening. Mrs. McFry, who had spent the night with her sister across the road, returned the next day to find the lights and television on. Her son's wallet was still there.

''He was just fixing to take his bath,'' says Dolores, explaining that Jeffery had spent the day clearing brush. ''Someone drove up.

He was taken by force, by a gun. He had to be.''

Earlier that week, family members spotted an unfamiliar blue van up the road but thought nothing of it. Now, the vehicle plays a part of the sketchy sequence of events that play over and over in their minds as they try to piece together any information that might lead them to McFry.

For some reason, tips about McFry's location have been frequent. Soon after he disappeared, the word was out: Jeffery McFry was in a well. Possibly Burrows, too, investigators surmised. The searches became intense. The Piedmont Rescue Squad, the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, Calhoun sheriff's deputies peered into old wells and combed the dense woods of Calhoun, Etowah, Cherokee, and Cleburne counties.

James Burrows and Jeffery's uncle, Herman McFry, spent days dropping three-pronged hooks into wells around Piedmont and in Borden Springs with the hope — ''lord, yes'' — of pulling up nothing.

And nothing has been the result.

''The torment of the calling, the hearsay,'' says Dolores. ''They kept saying every well between here and everywhere. Then Patrick was at the dump and all this stuff. That was the worst thing. ''Than you think, is there a well we didn't search?'' she says. ''And you kept visualizing. Was he alive down there in the well? Was there water down there? What's he living on? Dead dogs?''
From the end of August until the end of November, ''we went out every afternoon and every weekend,'' says Ray Ragan, captain of the Piedmont Rescue Squad, who was part of a team of some 30 men searching with picks and shovels. ''But as many wells as there are, this could go on forever.''
''We kept finding nothing,'' he says, ''and we were walking over ground again and again and again.'' Ragan suspects several ''sidewalk'' tips were designed to steer the law away from marijuana fields — and possibly from the bodies.
Still, he says, ''if someone says they found something, we go out and check it out.''

As in the case of Marlin Shuler — whose death Chandler was convicted of ordering, and whose skeletal remains were found only after the trigger-man led authorities to the grave at a Cleburne County pond — Ragan and other searchers say someone will have to lead them to Burrows and McFry. ''We're going to have to have some help,'' Ragan says simply.

With Chandler out of the scene, investigators hope leads will begin to come in again. ''I think 50 percent of your fear has been taken out of Piedmont,'' says Kirby, of the sheriff's department. ''And every murderer wantsto tell somebody.''

''Somebody knows,'' adds sheriff deputy Don Glass. ''Somebody's been told. All we need is a tip.''

For the families, though, knowing what happened will never explain why. They admit their children had problems with marijuana, with alcohol, but they are quick to point out such offenses don't warrant murder.

''I told Patrick not to be bothering with pot patches,'' says Burrows, who maintains his only son stole marijuana to smoke, not to sell. ''He told me he's not going to get hurt.''

''I knew Pat was with the wrong crowd,'' says his sister, Melinda Ratliff, ''but I was praying he would get his life straightened out.''

''It doesn't matter what her son has done,'' Dolores says, referring to Mrs. McFry, who has another son and a daughter. ''You can't just take another person's life.''

Now, Kirby says he's planning another search of Snow Lake, where Shuler's body was dug up. And family members continue to check out each clue. Until bodies are retrieved, their lives are at a standstill.

''We can't put the past in the past because we don't know what the past is,'' says Dolores. ''To bring us through this, we've got to have the evidence. We want his bones.''

http://z13.invisionfree.com/PorchlightUSA/index.php?showtopic=264&st=0

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Former police chief: Disappearances, arrest and trial split Piedmont
By Matt Kasper
Staff Writer
04-28-2008

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A collage of newspaper clippings about two of Piedmont's missing persons Patrick Burrows and Jeff McFry is shown. Photo: Bill Wilson/The Anniston Star

PIEDMONT — The missing people, the arrest and trial, followed by the appeals and questionable testimony from witnesses — all of this split Piedmont, says Rick Doyal.

The former Piedmont police chief says many people in town thought marijuana farming wasn't that bad.

"If that was all that was involved," Doyal speculates, "(David Ronald Chandler) would still be free."

Chandler is in prison at Hazelton, W.Va., for marijuana trafficking and soliciting the murder of Marlin Shuler, who had become an informant for police about Chandler's alleged marijuana operation.

Chandler was convicted under a previously untested federal drug kingpin law. The law allows for capital punishment when an intentional killing occurs in connection with a continued criminal enterprise.

The prosecution from the early 1990s eventually generated so much attention that President Bill Clinton commuted Chandler's death sentence.

To those who doubt Chandler's guilt, Fred Gasbarro, special agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency in Huntsville for 24 years, says the case speaks for itself.

"You don't get that many people lined up saying something if it isn't true," he said, referring to the plethora of people who testified against Chandler during his trial.

"Really and truly, he headed a marijuana manufacturing operation that was very large scale, and if you got in his way, he killed you."

Many have speculated that Chandler's drug operation also connected the disappearances of two other people around the same time.

After so many years have passed without any new information coming forward about Patrick Burrows and Jeff McFry, Doyal says he "challenges the line of thinking" that the missing people were not connected to Chandler.

Preceding the disappearances, a series of threatening acts of vandalism took place against city property, he recounts, incidents that coincided with mounting police pressure on Chandler's operation.

In 1989 and 1990 someone fired shots at the Piedmont High School building, damage was done to the Water Works, Gas and Sewer Board pumping station and equipment at the Piedmont-Jacksonville landfill was set ablaze. The city sports complex was also lit on fire. Several sticks of dynamite were discovered under a Piedmont police car parked adjacent to the Police Department, among other happenings.

In newspaper accounts Doyal referred to the acts as "narco-terrorism" intended to intimidate police and city officials.

No one was ever arrested for the vandalism. After Chandler was imprisoned, two men were convicted in 1991 of throwing a Molotov cocktail into the home of a Piedmont woman cooperating with the conviction of Chandler and 14 co-defendants. It did not ignite, and no one was hurt.

Complicating matters is the fact that another person went missing seven years after Chandler's conviction — Karen Steed.

Though no one has been arrested in her disappearance, Doyal says he thinks Steed went missing because of what she knew about the other missing people.

Karen Steed was last seen by her husband Jimmy Steed as she left their home on Nov. 25, 1997, at 9:30 a.m.

Steed's sister reported her missing three days later.

Karen Steed's 1982 Ford Fairmont was found abandoned the next month along Interstate 20 eastbound, about a quarter of a mile west of Heflin.

Steed maintains his innocence in both the Burrows case and his wife's case.

"I ain't running from nothing. I got nothing to run from," the Piedmont resident says in a telephone interview. Steed says he even talks to detectives about once every two years and tells them, in the case of Burrows, he's as heartbroken as the man's mother about what happened to her son. In the case of his wife, Steed said he was not surprised she was gone because she would often drive away to visit her sister. Still, he never expected her to not come back.

He acknowledges that the fact he is the brother of Piedmont resident Bobby Steed — sentenced to at least 17 years for conspiracy to distribute marijuana and described as Chandler's "right hand man" in newspaper stories — probably makes him a compelling suspect in the minds of police.

During Bobby Steed's 1991 trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harwell Davis pronounced at one point, according to a story in The Star: "On May 8, 1990 Ronnie Chandler wanted to show people not to cross him. Shuler found out the hard way, as did Burrows and McFry: Don't mess with Ronnie Chandler," Davis said during his closing arguments. 'And by association with Ronnie Chandler, nobody messed with Bobby J. Steed."

The chatter of a town of around 5,000 people hasn't helped either.

"I've heard a million stories," Steed says. "They ain't got nothing to do but talk and gossip. (But) God only knows what's happened."

Then again, familial coincidence is not enough to arrest somebody when no evidence is available.

"The biggest problem is you don't have a body for either one of them," says former Alabama Bureau of Investigations detective Greg Cole, referring to the case of Burrows and Steed.

Thus, solving the crimes means interviewing the same people over and over again and digging lots of holes whenever a tip comes in. After Burrows' motorcycle was found, the men say the land and surrounding hills were combed with radar tracking used to located cadavers.

"Somebody knows something," says Kirby, who concedes that none of the cases generate the tips they did two decades ago — even 10 years ago.

Investigators urge anyone with information to call the Calhoun County Sheriff's Office at 237-4731.

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