Victim's past sheds little light on killer

Murder victim Ron Ford was fun-loving, restless and the only friend who took up Eric Dickson on his invitation to drive to Florida.

By KELLEY BENHAM, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 1, 2002

TARPON SPRINGS -- All murders are unusual here because they are so rare. But this one, from the start, has been especially strange.

It has been more than a month since Ron Ford Jr. was found dead and glaringly out of place on upscale waterfront Bayshore Drive, slumped in a customized Honda, bleeding on the leather seat from a bullet hole in his side.

That day, Oct. 22, rap music pounded from the car's open windows. The questions began immediately, as neighbors peered past police tape at the stranger under the yellow tarp.

"This kid, he doesn't belong here," one said. "But who shot him, and why?"

Tarpon Springs generally sees a murder or two a year, and most are solved in a matter of days, police say. This investigation has passed the usual time frame with no word about suspects, motive or evidence. Police have asked the public for help piecing together the events of that day. But they have provided no information themselves.

Investigators have to be unusually quiet, said police Capt. Ronnie Holt, because this is an unusual case. What makes it so unusual, he can't say.

"This might be that 1 percent of cases that we never get to talk about," Holt said. He will say that Ford was shot somewhere else and apparently drove to Bayshore Drive.

That leaves a cluster of small towns in Pennsylvania aching for answers about what happened to Ford when he made his first trip to Florida in October. It leaves a quiet community in Tarpon Springs wondering how the killing came literally to its doorstep.

There is one person who can fill in at least a piece of the puzzle of who Ford was and how he came to die 1,100 miles from his home.

Ford, 25, came to Florida because of a spontaneous streak and a man named Eric Dickson.

Dickson, 18, brought Ford to Florida from Pennsylvania in the little Honda a couple of days before the murder. He and his girlfriend, Christina Salopek, were the only people Ford knew in Florida.

Dickson had some trouble with drugs and with the Tarpon Springs police before October. Now he and his lawyer say he's a murder suspect, too.

Dickson's lawyer won't let him talk about the day Ford died, but he can describe the events that led up to it.

"The kid was one of my best friends," Dickson said. "I want to know who killed him, too."

Ford was a stranger here, with no particular plan and no particular place to go. He drew stares at Fred Howard Park with his low rider tattoo and his old-school rap music. He wore nothing but gray shorts, with his hair all messy like he'd just woken up.

He stood out on the quiet roads of western Pennsylvania just like he did here. Everybody recognized his unmistakable cars bouncing at stop lights, blasting that music.

He grew up in little places called Moon Township, Crescent Township, Sewickley, Aliquippa. He was the oldest of four and the son of a mechanic. He played football and basketball. All he ever really wanted to do, his friends said, was tear apart cars. Sometimes, he would put them back together.

He drove anything with an engine on it. Brakes were optional, and the wrecks were spectacular. Once, he drove a dirt bike down a hill and smacked it into the side of his own house. He always got up grinning, and acted like it didn't hurt.

He bought so many cars his friends lost count. He liked them long and wide and low to the ground. He smelled like grease. No matter how much he scrubbed his hands, they never came clean.

He hated to be still. "Let's do something," he would say.

"What?" His friends would say.

Anything.

And so they would find themselves dirt biking at 2 a.m. Or they'd answer a midnight knock at the door and he would rush in and tackle them to the ground.

"He was the most nuts kid I ever met," Dickson said.

He had a girl. He met Holly Cairns at an amusement park, and they rode a little car into a dark tunnel. And then they rode again and again. For six years, they were never apart.

He was clumsy at romance, but he tried so hard. When he picked her flowers, he left the roots on.

Dickson said he can't remember when he met Ford. It seems like he always knew him, he said.

Dickson grew up in Crescent Township, northwest of Pittsburgh. His life began to unravel in 1994, he said, when his mother was killed aboard USAir Flight 427, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, killing 132 people. He was 11 then.

After that, Dickson started doing drugs, he said. He got a trust fund from a settlement from his mother's death. It is enough money that he does not have to work. He has told police that he's addicted to heroin. In an interview, he said he takes methadone, which is used to ease heroin withdrawal.

Despite his problems, Dickson said, Ford stuck by him. He and Ford went camping and to car shows together. A few months before Ford was shot, they went to Michigan and bought Dickson's flashy silver Honda Civic CRX. It had an Acura engine, Alpine sound system, throbbing subwoofers and ebony rims. The car is police evidence now.

Dickson split his time between Florida and Pennsylvania. In Tarpon Springs, where his father owns a house, he'd had some trouble with the police. Arrested for cocaine possession in June, Dickson accused the police of stealing cash from his confiscated car and planting drugs in it.

Police missed a variety of drugs when they searched Dickson's car but found them on a subsequent search. An officer was disciplined for missing the drugs, Capt. Holt said. But he dismissed Dickson's other allegations.

Dickson has no credibility, Holt said. "Zero."

Dickson also faces charges in Hillsborough County from an August arrest for possession of cocaine and DUI.

He was due in court in both counties in November, so he and Christina planned a trip to Florida in late October.

Dickson says he and Ford were close friends, but they had at least one argument a couple of weeks before the trip. Dickson remembers it as a few angry words about a lengthy cell phone call.

And Dickson also called the Conway Borough police in Pennsylvania after Ford took Christina to a motel because she had no place to stay, he said. He was angry, he said, because he thought Christina was with someone else. If he'd known it was Ford, he never would have gotten upset, he said.

"We didn't have no tension," Dickson said. "We never fought."

Dickson invited Ford and some other friends to Florida days before the trip. Only Ford was spontaneous enough to go.

Ford had planned to stay just a week or so. He called all his friends and relatives just before he left and said goodbye.

His grandmother told him to behave himself. At least three of his friends, including Holly, begged him not to go.

But he squeezed into the little car with Dickson and Christina anyway. They set up a bed in the backseat and took turns driving, 18 hours straight, listening to Ford's favorite rap CD, by Mystikal, most of the way.

The first night, they went to Clearwater Beach and walked on the pier. The next day, they rode Harley Davidson motorcycles, listened to music and soaked in the sun.

"We had a blast," Dickson said. "Everything was totally normal. You couldn't see anything was going to happen."

Over the weekend, Ford called his friend J.R. Madden and his girlfriend Holly Cairns in Pennsylvania. He told them he couldn't wait to get home, they said.

He told Holly he was going to the beach Tuesday to find shells for her. He said he'd call the next afternoon. That call never came.

Some teenagers saw Ford sunbathing next to the Honda at Fred H. Howard Park Tuesday afternoon. A couple of hours later, a construction worker found him dead in the car in a front yard at 623 Bayshore Drive.

After Ford's body was identified, the police came to Dickson's door.

He said he let them in, let them search the house, answered their questions, took a lie detector test and submitted cheek cells for DNA testing.

His lawyer, Steve Bartlett, said Dickson's previous dealings with the police, including his claims that they stole money from and planted drugs in his car, make his status as a suspect "kind of freaky."

"If they did arrest him obviously I would make a big deal about that," Bartlett said.

Dickson makes a simpler case.

"I didn't do nothing," Dickson said. "They're just lost."

Holt will not say whether Dickson is a suspect.

As his drug charges work through the courts, Dickson waits at his father's house in Tarpon Springs. The police have not ordered him to stay in town, he said.

At the house, Ford's clothes are still lying in the guest room. Dickson goes in there sometimes, and it feels like Ford isn't gone.

"I act like he's still here," Dickson said. "I just believe he's going to come in and help me out of this."

Back home, more than 400 came to say goodbye to Ford in his baby blue casket with the picture of the Last Supper on it. He would have wanted to go out in something so flashy, his friends said.

It wasn't until they saw him lying there that they believed it was really him, said his friend Bryan Madden. They knew him even without the dirty T-shirt, even without the silly grin.

Except they could not stop staring at his hands. They were too clean.

His friends have not heard from Dickson and they have heard little from the police, so they wrestle with the lingering questions in their minds. They pass the time telling stories about Ford, and they never seem to run out.

They have decided to finish Ford's latest car restoration project -- a 1960 Buick Electra.

Like Dickson, J.R. Madden, Bryan's brother, sometimes feels as if Ford isn't really gone. He talks to him all day long -- just simple conversation, little reassurances.

He tells him he will take care of Holly, because Ford would have needed to hear that. But some things go unsaid.

What happened?

Who killed you?

Why?

"I can't ask him that," Madden said. "He couldn't tell me, anyway."

-- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report. Kelley Benham can be reached at (727) 445-4182.

To help

Tarpon Springs police want to hear from anyone who saw Ron Ford Jr. or the car he was driving on Oct. 22, particularly between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. The car is a silver 1990 Honda CRX hatchback with a black hood and Michigan tag number XT3000. The car has black alloy rims, a spoiler, Euro-style taillights and large lettering across the hood that reads "driver side." Witnesses can call Detective Robert Faugno at (727) 938-2849.

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