BY Dawn Shurmaitis<\/p>\n
Monday, December 4, 1995<\/p>\n
About a week ago, Lee Atkinson had a dream about his long-dead brother,
\nBill. In the dream, the two brothers laughed and talked and had a helluva
\ntime together.<\/p>\n
Lee took the dream as a sign.<\/p>\n
It was time to get people thinking about Bill again, and the gunman who
\nkilled him Jan. 12, 1987.<\/p>\n
“Nobody should get away with murder,” says Lee.<\/p>\n
“We shouldn’t bury and forget him.”<\/p>\n
Bill, who lived in Hanover Township, was shot in his black Chevrolet Blazer
\nnear a remote strip mine, his body found by chance hours later by a group
\nof four-wheelers. The bullet entered Bill’s jaw and exited above his ear.<\/p>\n
Lee shakes his head at the memory of his brother’s shattered face.<\/p>\n
“They did the best they could,” he says of the mortician’s efforts. “But it
\nwasn’t him.”<\/p>\n
It was Lee who broke the news of the shooting to his mom.<\/p>\n
“She was terrified,” he recalls. “It tore her apart. He was the first-born
\nboy.”<\/p>\n
Married twice, Bill left behind four kids and two grandchildren. Most are
\ngrown now. Officially, the case is still open. Police never close the books
\non unsolved homicides.<\/p>\n
But after an intense investigation, the police inquiry into Bill’s murder
\nfizzled. No one came forward with information solid enough to lead to an
\narrest.<\/p>\n
Lee is highly appreciative of police efforts throughout the years and
\nunderstands why justice is so hard to come by.<\/p>\n
“They did an excellent job,” he says.<\/p>\n
Thursday, a state trooper drove from Wyoming to Lee’s trailer in a remote
\nsection of Salem Township to discuss the case and to let him know police
\nare still trying to find the killer.<\/p>\n
“Somebody out there knows something — something Bill said or did that
\nnight. Somebody should contact police,” Lee says. “They might not think
\nit’s important, but anything could bring this together.”<\/p>\n
Lee and Bill were two of nine kids born to Doris and Bill Sr., a coal miner
\nwith the Blue Coal Co.<\/p>\n
When they were younger, Lee and Bill got their kicks together by downing
\ndiet pills “for the high of it.”<\/p>\n
Lee knocks the table hard with his knuckles and smiles.<\/p>\n
“I ain’t took one in 20 years,” he says. “I’m done with all that crap.”<\/p>\n
The Atkinson family was not close, says Lee, who explains “different
\nsituations just split us up. We were all poor.”<\/p>\n
But if one brother needed something, the other brother provided.<\/p>\n
“You could call and ask Bill for anything — borrow money, anything,” Lee
\nsays.<\/p>\n
For a while, Lee worked for his brother, roofing in Nanticoke. Didn’t last.<\/p>\n
For a time, Lee also worked at the Benton foundry and in a diner. Lee, who
\nhas bad retinas, is now going blind and no longer works.<\/p>\n
He has lived the past 13 years in the Sleepy Hollow Trailer Park. He shares
\nthe ramshackle trailer with his girlfriend, Charlotte Wildoner, and their
\nbasset hound, Bonker.<\/p>\n
Lee is 42 now, the same age Bill was when he died. The two men looked alike
\n— both small, about 5 feet 2 inches tall, thin, with blue eyes and light
\nhair.<\/p>\n
Lee doesn’t try to paint a pretty picture of Bill. He’s honest.<\/p>\n
“He could be hard. Real hard. If you did something wrong, he’d smack you,”
\nsays Lee. “But he was real nice with his family.”<\/p>\n
Bill was especially generous to his parents, helping them with bills and
\nanything else they needed. Lee remembers one year, shortly after his father
\ngot cancer and was having trouble getting around. Lee bought each parent a
\nrecliner.<\/p>\n
Bill was arrested a few times, for drunken driving, assault, printing up
\nhis own money. He worked a lot, too, driving a tractor-trailer and other
\njobs.<\/p>\n
He drank — blackberry brandy and beer. He also sold cocaine, which an
\nautopsy revealed in his system.<\/p>\n
Lee thinks the drugs killed Bill. So do police, who have long speculated
\nBill died during a drug deal gone bad.<\/p>\n
If Bill hadn’t died, Lee is sure he would have ended his bad ways and
\nstarted a new life.<\/p>\n
“I think he would have gotten help. He knew it was a bad road. He knew he’d
\nreach the edge of the cliff and have to jump off,” says Lee, taking another
\npuff off his Private Stock cigarette.<\/p>\n
“He would have gotten off drugs and gotten everything together.”<\/p>\n
————————————————————————
\nAll content \u00a9 TIMES LEADER and may not be republished without permission.<\/p>\n
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\nMediaStream Inc., a Knight Ridder company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BY Dawn Shurmaitis Monday, December 4, 1995 About a week ago, Lee Atkinson had a dream about his long-dead brother, Bill. In the dream, the two brothers laughed and talked and had a helluva time together. Lee took the dream as a sign. It was time to get people thinking about Bill again, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dawnshurmaitis.net\/works\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}