Blair, was questioned but considered an unlikely suspect. Within a few weeks, the police had
tapped out their leads.
People in Monroe County began to whisper about the incompetence of the police. When
there were still no arrests several months later, the whispers became louder, and public
criticisms of the police, sheriff, and local prosecutor were aired in the local newspaper and on
local radio stations. Tom Tate was elected the new county sheriff days after the murder took
place, and folks started to question whether he was up to the job. The Alabama Bureau of
Investigation (ABI) was called in to investigate the murder but achieved no more success
solving the crime than local officials had. People in Monroeville became anxious. Local
businesses posted rewards offering thousands of dollars for information leading to an arrest.
Gun sales, which were always robust, increased.
Meanwhile, Walter was wrestling with his own problems. He had been trying for weeks to
end his relationship with Karen Kelly. The child custody proceedings and public scandal had
taken a toll on her; she had started using drugs and seemed to fall apart. She began to
associate with Ralph Myers, a white man with a badly disfigured face and lengthy criminal
record who seemed to perfectly embody her fall from grace. Ralph was an unusual partner for
Karen, but she was in such serious decline that nothing she did made any sense to her friends
and family. The relationship brought Karen to rock bottom, beyond scandal and drug use into
serious criminal behavior. Together they became involved in dealing drugs and were
implicated in the murder of Vickie Lynn Pittman, a young woman from neighboring Escambia
County.
Police had quick success in investigating the Pittman murder, rapidly concluding that Ralph
Myers had been involved. When the police interrogated Ralph, they encountered a man as
psychologically complicated as he was physically scarred. He was emotional and frail, and he
craved attention—his only effective defense was his skill in manipulation and misdirection.
Ralph believed that everything he said had to be epic, shocking, and elaborate. As a child
living in foster care, he had been horribly burned in a fire. The burns so scarred and
disfigured his face and neck that he needed multiple surgeries to regain basic functioning. He
became quite used to strangers staring at his scars with pained expressions on their faces. He
was a tragic outcast who lived on the margins, but he tried to compensate by pretending to
have inside knowledge about all sorts of mysteries.
After initially denying any direct involvement in the Pittman murder, Myers conceded that
he may have played some accidental role but quickly put the blame for the murder itself on
more interesting local figures. He first accused a black man with a bad reputation named
Isaac Dailey, but the police quickly discovered that Dailey had been in a jail cell on the night
of the murder. Myers then confessed that he had made up the story because the true killer
was none other than the elected sheriff of a nearby county.
As outrageous as the claim was, ABI agents appeared to take it seriously. They asked him
more questions, but the more Myers talked, the less credible his story sounded. Officials
began to suspect that Myers was the sole killer and was desperately trying to implicate others
to minimize his culpability.
While the death of Vickie Pittman was news, it failed to compare with the continuing
mystery surrounding the death of Ronda Morrison. Vickie came from a poor white family,