Civil Commotion

A Center Line man decided to get rid of a spider that was hanging-out around his gas tank by using a lighter.

Using a lighter to kill the bug, he started a blaze that quickly engulfed the gas pump.

He somehow escaped serious injury and the gas station’s damage was contained to one pump, which was destroyed. The incident was recorded at a Center Line gas station.

Too bad he didn’t use one of those personal flame-throwers that are now being sold in the Detroit area. He would have made history.

Stand back and really think about what Piper is saying here: When facts, evidence, and experience mount-up, with the result that you’re wondering how on earth you ever fell for that mess of rancid pottage, why — you must make war on your unbelief! You must resolve to believe even though your reason tells you the Christian narrative is nonsense. Do not trust yourself.

I say again, then: Christianity can thrive only amongst the insecure; it needs sickness; healthy people will have nothing to do with it.

I sold my first freelance pieces almost two decades go, true crime features for the old detective magazines. Mercifully, the editors didn’t demand writing as lurid as the artwork.

They were all published pseudonymously, so don’t bother trying to find them.

I wrote and sold dozens of pieces over a 2- to 3-year period, and have forgotten most of the stories, the names of most of the victims, and the names of most of their killers, too. Flicking through an archival copy of one of those magazines a while back, I was startled to realize I was skimming a piece that I had written but could remember nothing about. I finally stopped doing true crime pieces when, sitting in the breakfast nook with the newspaper one bright spring morning, I realized I was disappointed that it had been a few days since any Tarheels had exercised their extraordinary talent for garish murder (meaning, no projects in the pipeline).

A couple of stories have stuck in my head, though, because they were ones for which I opened files but could never complete. The worst of those, by a lot, is the murder of Shelby Rigsbee by Broadus Crabtree.

Rigsbee was a 31-year-old drug addict and prostitute, and her body was found in woods near some railroad tracks in nearby Durham. She had been beaten so badly that she was unrecognizable. A preliminary identification was made relying upon clothing and street notice that she was missing; the conclusive identification was made using fingerprints.

Almost immediately, suspicion fell upon a former Durham police officer named Broadus Crabtree. Crabtree had resigned the force because of ongoing medical problems in consequence of Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam. According to a news report of the time, Durham police were looking into Crabtree for other unsolved murders, too.

Three months later, a grand jury returned a sealed indictment and Crabtree was arrested; he entered a not guilty plea and bail was set at $100,000.

Two years later, Crabtree was in court to revise his plea to guilty; he was sentenced to probation. While Shelby Rigbee’s uncomprehending mother sat shocked, Crabtree walked out the front door of the courthouse and held an impromptu news conference during which he once again denied killing Rigsbee. He had changed his plea to guilty, he said, just to get the unpleasantness over with and to move on with his life.

Like … WTF??

And that was the end of the story — with far more questions left unanswered than resolved.

• What drew the police’s attention to Crabtree? Was he known to hang-out with hookers and to be prone to violence?

• Assuming he’s guilty, why did Crabtree kill Rigsbee? I have never been able to get a copy of the autopsy report out of the Medical Examiner, though it is supposed to be a public record; I have got a copy of the toxicology report, and Rigsbee had cocaine and alcohol in her at the time of her death.

  There was popular speculation at the time, at least around the courthouse, that Crabtree provided Rigsbee with drugs in exchange for sex.

  So … partying gone bad? That’s not unheard of.

• But why, then, a sealed indictment? Durham County’s D.A. would not use that device again until the infamous Duke LaCrosse case. Why did this case, altogether humdrum on its face, warrant that secrecy?

• What about the report that Durham police were looking at Crabtree for other unsolved murders? Yes? No? Uninformed chatter that should never have made it into the newspaper in the first place?

• And why the light sentence?

Crabtree died in 2001, and is buried in a family plot near the coast. Rigsbee is buried in a shadowed corner of a small, hard-to-find church cemetery in Durham; the cemetery is maintained, but there is no evidence that anybody ever visits Rigsbee’s grave (the cup with a few buds is an ad hoc decoration by my wife, Dawn). The grave is marked with a small PVC cross and a metal tag.

And … that’s that. Nobody would talk then, the paperwork was shrouded, the lawyers orchestrated a hasty denouement, and the primary actors are all dead. Life goes on.

There are stories just like this on the seamy underside of every small town and city in America; they can’t all be chronicled, and most don’t deserve to be. But, seriously, even a hooker deserves better than Shelby Rigsbee got.

It is the custom of a pack of Southern Baptist oddities who go by the name Pyromaniacs to publish a portion of a sermon by Charles Spurgeon every Sunday morning. This week, predictably enough, they reprise Protestant hatred of Catholicism.

The thick pollutions of thine abominable church forbid the idea of descent from any apostle but the traitor Judas.

Since he was cursed who rebuilt Jericho, much more the man who labours to restore Popery among us. In our fathers’ days the gigantic walls of Popery fell by the power of their faith, the perseverance of their efforts, and the blast of their gospel trumpets; and now there are some who would rebuild that accursed system upon its old foundation.

O Lord, be pleased to thwart their unrighteous endeavours, and pull down every stone which they build. It should be a serious business with us to be thoroughly purged of every error which may have a tendency to foster the spirit of Popery, and when we have made a clean sweep at home we should seek in every way to oppose its all too rapid spread abroad in the church and in the world.

The abiding irony is that Southern Baptists are now ‘Baptist’ in name only, because they have rejected each of that tradition’s three great distinctives. They now practice infant baptism, their rejection of separation of church and state is manifest in their activism, and they teach that the priesthood of the believer is vested in only pastors. Indeed, that last, in combination with their heavy-handed authoritarianism in matters of conscience, raises a fair question of whether they should even be considered Protestants any longer; I incline to say, No.

GOP religious conservatives channeling anger toward victory

Religious activists in the Republican Party, bolstered by House Speaker John Boehner’s sudden exit, say the next GOP presidential nominee must share their uncompromising stance on abortion rights, gay marriage and other priorities to get to the White House.

As Bette Davis might have said, fasten your seat belts.