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News of murderer stirs old memories
© St. Petersburg Times, Ican still remember the colors -- purple ink on yellow Teletype paper -- and the kicked-in-the-gut feeling I got when I saw Manny Tanner's name in a news story back in 1977. Apparently his loss left just as big a hole in my life as I thought it would when I wrote about him later that day, because when I saw the name of one of his killers in the St. Petersburg Times Tuesday, 24 years melted away in a flash. And when the Florida Parole Commission decided Wednesday that one of his killers should stay in prison for at least another 83 years, I quietly applauded. Information retrieval was a little more primitive in 1977 than it is now. A single Teletype circuit connected the Times and five of its bureaus -- including Dade City and Tampa -- so that anything written in one bureau printed out in all of them. When I went away on vacation I would (against orders) leave the machine on and just let 20 or 30 feet of paper spew off of a continuous roll, providing me with a linear look at what news I had missed. Halfway down the stirp that August day was a three-paragraph story describing the murder of "a 19-year-old Ybor City service station attendant," for $60 and a carton of cigarettes. Manny Tanner, whom I had met when he was a student at Pasco-Hernando Community College and who was working nights at the service station while continuing his education had his skull crushed by Charles Malone and Freddie Morris who, earlier in the day, had kidnapped and murdered St. Petersburg contractor Jesse Wilbur "Woody" Woodward. The crimes weren't immediately linked, and Woodward's case was always more prominent in coverage of the trials and legal maneuverings that left Malone and Morris serving life sentences. We covered St. Petersburg more aggressively than Tampa in those days, and Woodward left behind a wife and children. Manny left behind a family in Zephyrhills that chose to grieve privately, and a few friends who knew him as a budding poet, artist, book lover, and the kind of trusting, open kid that life sometimes just reaches out and gobbles up. He and I took a course together, one of those touchy-feely classes where students were asked to do things like fall backward and trust their classmates to catch them, or to reveal extremely personal feelings and vulnerabilities. Manny, a short, slender young man with shoulder length hair who was young enough to revel in playing a mean game of foosball in the student lounge, was always the first to volunteer. The only one he did poorly at was one where students racked up points by betraying a partner's trust. He was lousy at it. Betrayal, apparently, was a concept foreign to him. Artistically he worked with pencils, pastels, charcoal and paintbrushes to render sensitive pieces like a self-portrait his family loaned me to run with a column I wrote after his death. They also gave me an essay where he had written, "Only in death can we find release to experience and learn the secrets of the universe." A lot of kids write things like that, when they see dying as an abstract rather than a totally random and frighteningly close concept. He also wrote, "People are given life as a traveler is given a ticket for a trip; to experience, learn and share his acquired knowledge with others." I, at least, benefitted from Manny's sense of wonder at a world in which things sometimes could turn out incredibly bad for reasons that none of us would understand. I would talk about murder cases I was writing about. He would stare, wide-eyed. Woody Woodward's son and daughter showed up for Malone's parole hearing, the one with the satisfactory results, Wednesday, to make sure somebody told the parole board what they had lost. Nobody was there to speak for Manny. And when the first hearing for Freddie Morris comes up in 2006, I plan on being out of this business and probably out of this state. So let me say now that I remember the potential that was destroyed when Manny's life was snuffed out July 15, 1977, and I hope Woodward's children are there for that one, too. And that they are equally effective.
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Times columns today Mary Jo Melone Jan Glidewell Ernest Hooper Helen Huntley Gary Shelton Hubert Mizell Darrell Fry Robyn Blumner Bill Maxwell Philip Gailey Martin Dyckman From the Times North Suncoast desks |
