The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 3

is THE COURIER-JOURNAL LOUISVILLE, KY. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 1994. year old charged with killing brother, mother COOMTY MEADEV INDIANA COUNTY MlSt'W' N. Brandenburgf Midway 'r ing until her friend's mother came home. Told what had happened, the mother called police, but they had already received another report and gone to Caudill's house.

They found Caudill's 10-year-old brother, Nick, dead inside the house. Caudill's mother, Karen Cau-dill, 33, died a short time later at University Hospital in Louisville. Caudill, a Meade County High School freshman, was charged with two counts of capital murder. Police say he killed Nick with a shotgun after an argument and then shot his mother when she came home from her job at an insurance-company office in Louisville. Both shootings occurred at the up his military career.

That could not be confirmed yesterday. Dustin Caudill's close friend, Matt Meyers, then took Caudill to the New Brandenburg Baptist Church. The church's current and previous pastors, Doug Brown and Danny Haynes, respectively, said Caudill attended services for a month before being saved at an evangelistic "YouthFest" in Frankfort. Shortly after that, he was baptized and started regularly attending services and meetings of the church's youth group. His brother usually came with him, and Karen See MEADE Page 3, col.

6 tive. "We wish we knew," Greer said. "Everybody's asking that question." During the Monday-night conversation, Cain said, Caudill "said something about 'You just wouldn't understand all the abuse' at his house, and that he had to get to a safer place." That didn't solve the mystery yesterday for teary friends who described the Dustin they knew: a Christian, an average student, a person with many friends and what seemed to be a typical home life. Several people said they believed the Caudills moved to Meade County about two years ago from Fort Knox, after David Caudill wrapped SITE OF guilty in murders eade 15 By CYNTHIA EAGLES Staff Writer BRANDENBURG, Ky. Fifteen-year-old Dustin Caudill's phone call Monday night was so upsetting that his two young friends didn't believe him.

"I can't remember exactly what he said, but he told me he killed his little brother," 15-year-old Lee Ann Cain said yesterday. "And he said, 'I'm just waiting for my mom to come home because I'm gonna shoot her Cain said she and her 14-year-old girlfriend were alone at the girlfriend's house, and "we just went hysterical." She said they did noth- Juiy finds By MICHAEL JENNINGS Staff Writer George Robert Pierpont's day in court could cost him his life. After deliberating more than 10 hours Monday and yesterday, a Jefferson County jury found Pierpont, 21, guilty of complicity to commit wanton murder in the June 1991 killing of Delores Lovell. She and her husband, Reburn Lovell, were shot to death by John Edward Martinez, one of Pierpont's accomplices, during a robbery of the Lo-vells' Union County home. The jury convicted Pierpont of complicity to commit reckless homicide in Reburn Lovell's death.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Pierpont, calling him the brains behind the robbery at the Lo-vells' mobile home, which also housed a jewelry business. The same seven-woman, five-man jury will recommend a sentence to Special Judge Benjamin Shobe. 1 The jury also convicted Pierpont of first-degree robbery, complicity to receive stolen property and tarn- m.r i family's home on Ky. 261, about a mile south of Midway in Meade County. Police said David Caudill, Karen Caudill's husband and the boys' father, was at work in Shelby-ville at the time.

He could not be reached for comment yesterday. A closed hearing is scheduled for next Tuesday to determine whether Caudill should be treated as an adult under Kentucky's youthful-offender law. Yesterday, after Dustin Caudill was sent to the Clark County Jail in Winchester, Meade County Sheriff J. E. Greer and Kentucky State Police Detective Tommy Stiles said they had no information on a mo- both at Reburn Lovell "I knew everything was all right," Pierpont said.

"I thought both the people had done got shot and killed. Rebutting testimony that Pierpont was so upset by the killings that he wept, Whaley said Pierpont took a necklace off Reburn Lovell's body and later washed the blood from it and hung it around his own neck "That's how upset he was," she said. Whaley said Pierpont actions during the crime's planning and ex ecution showed he wanted the Lo veils' jewelry "at the cost of any one life who got the way. Testifying yesterday in the sen fencing phase, Pierpont's father, Robert S. Pierpont of Henderson, said his son attempted suicide by trying to electrocute himself in 1989.

Sister Mary Lois Speaks of Maple Mount said Pierpont helped her brother, a Catholic priest, recuper ate from a traffic accident in 1990. "He was literally my brother's crutch," she said. Pierpont trial was moved to Louisville because of publicity. Former U.S. Rep.

Don Fuqua of Florida, president of the Aerospace Industries Association, praised the report's recommendations. Arguing that it is contrary to the American tradition for the government to compete with private enterprise, he said, "We won the cold war and beat communism, and I hope we don't go in that direction." However, Donna Heivilin, a defense specialist with the General Accounting Office, a congressional watchdog agency, argued against ending public-private competition, saying prices are likely to rise, especially on work that only one or two companies can do. The report is merely advisory. The actual decisions on which depots and installations to close will be made next year by an independent commission, as was done in 1988, 1991 and 1993. There is no specific explanation yet of what "core" maintenance is, and Vice Adm.

Stephen Loftus, the Navy's logistics chief, said in an interview after the hearing that he doesn't know how much of the Louisville depot's work would qualify. SHOOTING STAFF MAP BY WES KENDALL Pierpont He refused life pering with physical evidence. State prosecutors had agreed earlier to recommend a prison sentence if Pierpont would plead guilty, but he rejected the deal last October. He claimed the state had reneged on a promise that he would get a lighter sentence than Martinez, the admitted trigger man. Martinez, 21, has pleaded guilty in Kentucky and received a sentence of life without possibility of parole for 25 years the same sentence Pierpont initially was offered.

Martinez has also agreed to plead guilty to armed robbery in Indiana. His combined sentences in both states would keep him in prison at least 45 years. A third participant in the Union County crimes, Pierpont's former girlfriend, Marie Lasewell, 19, pleaded guilty last week. Prosecutors offered to recommend a life sentence for her if she testified mittee hearing on the issue of public depots vs. private contractors.

A number of subcommittee members with military facilities in their districts blasted the new report, which calls for Pentagon depots to handle only "core" work, defined generally as the maintenance of essential weapon systems. The report, the product of a special task force made up of government and industry personnel, recommends turning everything else over to private contractors and ending the practice of letting depots Corrections An Associated Press story in Business yesterday misquoted Florence Alexander, chief executive of Ebon Research in Altamonte Springs, as saying that a Small Business Administration program for minority-owned companies failed to prepare her for real-world competition. Alexander actually said the program "showed me I could succeed in business." But when her company graduated from the program, Report sounds ominous for ordnance station in prison deal against Pierpont, making her eligible for parole in about nine years. In his closing arguments, defense attorney David Ward branded Lasewell a liar and called attention to what Martinez allegedly told a cellmate after Martinez, Pierpont and Lasewell were arrested in Henderson in July 1991. Martinez "said he killed these people just to watch them die," Ward said.

According to testimony, Martinez shot Reburn Lovell to death before Pierpont entered the mobile home through a back window. Pierpont bound Delores Lovell with tape before Martinez killed her. Assistant Attorney General Barbara Whaley, the lead prosecutor, said it was Pierpont's idea to kill the Lovells if they resisted. She asked the jury to ponder a statement Pierpont made in a taped confession. When he heard the first two shots not knowing Martinez had fired compete with private companies.

It also proposes repealing a law that prohibits the services from contracting out more than 40 percent of their depot maintenance work. Neither the report nor yesterday's hearing dealt with specific depots. Nevertheless, the report clearly supports the contention made by FMC and other defense contractors that they need more maintenance business to remain profitable as the demand for new weapons shrinks, along with the nation's defense establishment. clarifications she said, it was "hit with the discriminatory practices that hurt many minority businesses that try to succeed." Because of an editing error, the context of a legislative roll call was wrong in a boxed item on April 3. The House rejected by a vote of 46-44 a conference committee's version of House Bill 250, the health-reform bill not the bill itself.

STAFF PHOTO BY BYRON CRAWFORD David Pierson displayed the white stone formation he obtained in 1955 from the floor of the Mediterranean Sea. True Brit Cumberland farmer cultivates culture of his English heritage By MIKE BROWN Staff Writer WASHINGTON Early shots are already being fired in the 1995 battle over military depots. A new Pentagon report says that there are too many of them and that more maintenance work should be contracted out to private defense companies. The debate directly involves the future of the Louisville Naval Ordnance Station, one of the area's largest employers. The depot dodged a closure threat last year that was engineered by a private competitor, the FMC but it is in danger again in the new round of base closings set for next year.

The Defense Department has 24 depots not yet marked for closing, and the scuttlebutt is that a third of those are likely to bite the dust next year, said Dennis Crouch, business manager for the Navy division that includes the Louisville operation. "I would say our chances are at least 30 percent of closing," Crouch said in an interview yesterday after a House Armed Services subcom i ft i 4 1 -j in 1980 at the age of 50, and he came south, he said, looking for affordable land. When a deal near Rogersville, fell through, he wandered on in search of a quiet spot where he could retire, paint and write. He wound up in Cumberland County. "I'm not an artist; I'm a painter," he said.

"And I write for my own enjoyment. I fell in love with this place 96 acres, more or less, as they say in the deed (and) bought it from the real-estate broker." Three years ago he married his third wife, Patsy, 36, who grew up on the farm that he owns. She has horses, and he has painting and poetry and a ion run ot books and other mementoes that have followed him from exotic places around the world to a little farmhouse in the hollow along Mud Camp Creek. Pierson cradled in his hands a smooth, white, odd-shaped stone, with a small hole on one edge. It appeared to be the work of a sculptor.

"I love this," he said. "It's a natural formation that one can only suppose had been shaped over a tremendously long time by movement on the bottom of the sea. It wasn't far off shore, near an eastern Mediterranean island. Fishermen had talked about it. They had seen it down about 80 feet.

The Mediterranean is as clear as a window down to that depth. The locals had given it the name 'the Madonna of the So I went off diving, and found it in 1955." Everywhere Pierson has traveled since then, the stone has been with him. He said he once had it insured through Lloyd's for 15,000 pounds (about $22,000 at this week's exchange rate). Now it sits, gathering dust in the shadows, with Sir Walter Scott and Shakespeare. "Maybe someone with an appreciative eye for art will buy it some day," he said.

"I'm 63 years of age, and my father died when he was 65. I'm sort of winding down, and there's not much point in me dying and having this sold at a local real-estate auction." wmmmmsmMmwm MARROWBONE, Ky. -David Pierson is not your typical Cumberland County farmer. If you saw him sitting on the front porch of his simple white house on Mud Camp Creek, or on his way to the barn in his dilapidated 71 Ford pickup, you might not notice anything unusual. But if you stopped to chat, his flawless Oxford English would instantly suggest that he is more familiar with the Thames than with Mud Camp Creek, and that he could find his way around better in London, England, than in London, Ky.

Were you to follow Pierson into the loft of his stock barn, and see the long rows of homemade bookshelves containing Sir Walter Scott's complete collection of Waverly novels, many of Shakespeare's works and, he guesses, about 6,000 other European literary works, you'd figure that this farmer had not been tendine BYRON CRAWFORD COLUMNIST crops on Mud Camp Creek all his life. And you might want to ask where he came from and how he wound up here. Allow me. Pierson was born in London, but he grew up in the county of Suffolk and later lived in Essex, he said. He was educated at the Harrow School and read law for two years at St.

Peter's College in Oxford. Then he joined Lloyd's of London and spent the next 17 years there as an underwriter. He modestly passed over most of his career, but did mention that he once commanded a special-forces reserve unit of the Royal Marines. "At that time, I had a tremendous urge to succeed at whatever I was doing," Pierson said. "My father who was with Lloyd's was a role model and I was very motivated." He moved to New York in 1969 to work for a reinsurance brokerage firm, he said, and eventually helped organize another such firm in Connecticut.

Failing health forced him to give up working Iff yv if i- 1 11 4 -z XhA -'t I. i ,1 '-A- 4 STAFF PHOTO BY STEWART BOWMAN GOOPOYE, HIGH DIVE: Lexington Park and Recreation Department workers lifted the support for a 3-meter diving board over a fence yesterday as they took It away from Woodland Park pool. All 3-meter boards are being removed from Lexington pools because of safety and liability concerns. The workers are Ted Slomlnsky, right; Mike Crowe, back to camera; and Scott Smouse. 1.