An Outsider’s Murder Trial Shakes a Southern Town

Global primormordial bond that ties the man to the land

ADAM NOSSITER
NYT, 15 February

ABBEVILLE, S.C., Feb. 14 — It was a dispute over 20 feet of mean-looking land, a deadly squeeze of the trigger three years ago backed by pure conviction and an unwavering motto.
The Bixby family refused to budge for a highway-widening project, out of belief. “Live free or die,” cried Steve Bixby, bespectacled and rigged out in camouflage and guns the day of the shooting, in a challenge to the authorities, witnesses said.

Mr. Bixby, 39, and his father, Arthur, 77, are accused of murder in the fatal shootings of two law enforcement officers who were trying to seize the land on behalf of the State of South Carolina. Both men face the death penalty. Mr. Bixby’s mother, Rita, 74, was indicted as an accessory.

Now, with the opening Wednesday of Mr. Bixby’s trial in the murder of Deputy Sheriff Danny Wilson, 37, and Donnie Ouzts, 63, a state constable, this Old South town with its intense Confederate heritage is reliving the winter’s day in 2003 when the reclusive Bixbys held off the local police for 14 hours, after the shootings of Mr. Wilson and Mr. Ouzts.

The town is doing so gingerly. There were no supporters of the Bixbys on hand Wednesday as a jury sat in judgment over what the authorities say was Mr. Bixby’s deadly act of resistance to authority. He is reviled in Abbeville, and the prosecutor had to pick his jury 160 miles away.

What the authorities said was Mr. Bixby’s armed refusal to give up a small piece of his land for the widening of Highway 72 — “We will protect it to our last breath,” he is reported to have proclaimed — is regarded here as senseless. Guns at the ready, Mr. Bixby was primed and waiting for his face-off with the police, witnesses said.

On the other hand, symbols of resistance to central authority, some of the South’s most hallowed, abound here, lovingly tended in the quaint little town billing itself for passing tourists as the “Birthplace and Deathbed of the Confederacy.”

Up the street from the mellow brick courthouse is the white-columned mansion where Jefferson Davis had his last cabinet meeting; nearby, one of the first rallies demanding secession was held in 1860. The monument to the Confederate dead outside the courthouse proclaims that “the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee were in the right;” the Confederate flag flies high above the highway; and a bookstore off the old brick square sells titles like “The South Was Right” and “Myths of Slavery.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., says the Abbeville area, in the western part of the state, has attracted others like the Bixbys — fanatics about property rights and resistance to authority who find the Confederate heritage nourishing. “We’ve pointed out that that area is one of the hotbeds,” said Mark Potok, a staff director at the center.

Residents deny that there is any connection between the region’s Confederate heritage and a violent property-rights ideology.

“I have no clue why the Bixbys moved here,” said the man running the bookstore, Robert Hayes, who also is the state director for the League of the South, a neo-Confederate group still pushing for Southern independence. “He could have picked any place in South Carolina.”

Indeed, one the first things people here say about the Bixbys is that they were “outsiders,” as Mr. Hayes put it, “not us.” About 10 years ago they moved from New Hampshire, where they were involved with an anti-tax/anti-zoning group, and had had run-ins with a judge.

Why the family chose Abbeville is, people here say, a mystery. “Abbeville is just not like that,” said Cheri Standridge, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce.

Amanda Dean, who runs a coffee shop on the square, said the family had the wrong idea about the town. “This is a good, strong family town,” Ms. Dean said. “It’s just such a shame. They could feel like they’re coming to their homeland, and that’s what’s so sad.”

The Bixbys may have warmed to Abbeville, but the feeling was not reciprocated by the genteel town. Steve Bixby, heavy-set and marginally employed in construction and food-concession vending, a sometime karaoke singer at a local bar, remained an outsider, while he and his parents fulminated together in the modest little clapboard house about the horrors of government interference. It is still pock-marked with bullet holes.

Indeed, the culture clash between the Yankee Bixbys and their reluctant Southern hosts was on vivid display in the trial’s opening testimony Wednesday. Several witnesses — plain-talking highway engineers who had encountered the Bixbys in the days before the shootings on Dec. 8, 2003 — testified with shock about the family’s propensity for profanity.

“During all this they continued to cuss,” said Drew McCaffrey of the South Carolina Department of Transportation. “There was a lot of cussing from Steve and Rita,” Mr. McCaffrey said.
“They were cussing an awful lot, him and his mom,” said Mr. McCaffrey’s colleague Dale Williams, who recalled the “No Government Agents” sign in the front yard. Michael Hannah, another department employee, recalled, “They basically started making some threats, and there was cussing.”

The verbal violence — “ranting and raving,” Mr. Williams called it — presaged the physical, the witnesses said. A chilling scene confronted him when he drove by on the morning of the shooting: Steve Bixby, framed by his house, “a pistol in his right hand and a long gun in his left.” The witness added soberly, “I knew at that time the officer was in trouble.” Mr. Wilson was shot in the chest and Mr. Ouzts in the back, at the doorstep.

Both men were well-known and well-liked; a young man, asked if he knew them, bit his lip and ducked his head as he hurried out of the coffee shop on the square. “They want to put it behind them,” said Bill Greene, a retired electrical technician, of the townspeople. “Lot of times, people move into these little towns, they think they can have things their way. But you have to obey the laws.”