4 minutes changed everything
By Lucy Morgan, Times Senior Correspondent
St. Petersburg Times (FL)
Originally pubished on 3/11/07
MARIANNA, Fla. - They had lunch together, the sheriff and his wife, and later he gave her $500 to replenish her dwindling checking account.
Late that afternoon, Sheriff John P. “Johnny Mac” McDaniel headed to Winn-Dixie to pick up fruit for dinner.
His cell phone rang, Mellie McDaniel checking in.
“She said, ‘I’m on our road headed to the house, and when you get home I’m gonna kiss all over your ugly head for giving me that money today.’ ”
Someone had slowed to turn into their 30-acre farm home.
“She said, ‘Somebody is pulling in behind me,’ ” McDaniel recalled. “I said, ‘Pull on in the driveway, but keep the phone in your hand and tell them we don’t want any.’ ”
He wasn’t concerned - door-to-door salesmen often visited. “But I could tell she was a little frightened. I said, ‘Stay with me, baby.’ I kept talking to her, and moments later I heard her scream.”
The sheriff radioed for help. Deputy Michael Altman was only two minutes from the house. Coming from different directions, Sheriff McDaniel, Capt. Joey Rabon and Cpl. Billy Dozier converged on Highway 73 and raced for the house.
McDaniel’s guns were in a zipped bag in the back of his Chevy Tahoe, where he put them over the weekend while hauling grandchildren. He fumbled for his spare gun, buried beneath music tapes in his front seat console, but no luck. He couldn’t find it.
He and the other two officers pulled into the driveway four minutes after Mellie McDaniel’s scream for help. The sheriff jumped out of his Tahoe. As he rounded the front of the car, a man in camouflage clothing stepped out of the bushes, leveled a .38-caliber Taurus handgun at him and fired.
The bullet lodged in McDaniel’s car as he hit the ground and rolled back behind his open front door.
How did his assailant miss?
“God put up a shield is all I can tell you, because he was about 10 feet away from me when he fired.”
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Dozier opened up with his .40-caliber Glock and Rabon fired an AR-15, the civilian version of the military’s M16 semiautomatic rifle. The man in the camouflage went down.
A second man appeared, in a suit, tie, hat and ponytail, pointing a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol toward the sheriff’s position. Dozier fired until he took out the second man.
The sheriff found Mellie and Deputy Altman, side by side, near the back door. The killers apparently had dragged them there so anybody rolling up to the house wouldn’t have known anything was amiss.
Mellie had been shot in the back of the head with a .38, while kneeling down. Altman had been shot once in the face and twice more while lying on his back.
In the space of about four minutes, four lives were taken.
McDaniel’s first thought was that the attacks might be connected to an 18-year-old case his department is following leads on, in which an elderly couple that made a fortune in the lumber business were murdered.
But after the bodies of his wife and Altman were put in ambulances, one of McDaniel’s deputies informed him that the man in camouflage was Lionel Sands, the suspect in a six-year-old murder case.
Sands’ wife had been found in their swimming pool, in less than 3 feet of water. She died from a blow just behind her ear, possibly by a hammer.
Though suspected of murder, Sands was never charged. But neither would life insurance companies allow him to collect more than $500,000 in benefits.
The day before the Jan. 30 shootout in McDaniel’s front yard, Sands had learned that he was going to be liable for about $32,000 in legal expenses stemming from a federal court fight over his wife’s insurance.
He had apparently been planning the attack on the McDaniels for some time. Investigators believe Sands and the other gunman, 54-year-old Daniel Brown, had been watching the McDaniels for more than a month.
They even stopped by the house on the pretense of looking for someone named McDonald. After the shootings a friend told police that Mellie McDaniel had described one of them as having a ponytail and dressed in a suit and tie.
Plus there was the book that Sands checked out of the Marianna library in December.
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The Hostage, a novel by W.E.B. Griffin, tells the story of the kidnapping of an American diplomat’s wife and the murder of her husband.
McDaniel said Sands spent a lot of time reading books about kidnapping and torture. The day of the attacks, the 60-year-old Sands wore a wig, a false mustache and “about 50 pounds of makeup,” McDaniel said.
Inside the tan Ford Crown Victoria driven by Sands and Brown, who was his handyman, deputies found boxes of ammunition, latex gloves, bleach, duct tape, shopping bags, flexible handcuffs, and letters written by Sands.
The letters apologized for the murder investigation; it appeared the attackers planned to force McDaniel to sign them.
McDaniel said he was unaware of the insurance lawsuit between Sands and his dead wife’s family until after the shooting. He barely knew Sands, had frequently exchanged a hello with him at McDonald’s or Wal-Mart, but never had a conversation.
This month, a grand jury in Jackson County concluded that the sheriff apparently was the target of an “ill conceived and evil motive” that died with Sands and Brown.
“In just a few, brief but violent moments, these two assailants disrupted with tragic effect, the peace and tranquility of this county,” the grand jury said.
The county has had multiple murders before, but nothing that involved going after a law enforcement officer’s family. The sheriff didn’t wear a sidearm.
“I don’t want to sound like Andy Griffith - this ain’t Mayberry,” McDaniel said. “But this is a good county. We love one another. I can go talk to the meanest one and say, ‘Come on, go with me and we’ll let this thing take its course in the court system,’ and they’ll load up and go with me.”
Now he knows where his gun is all the time. “I was negligent. I won’t get out of a vehicle without a gun like that anymore.
“But it wouldn’t have changed anything that day. My wife was already dead.”
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He worked hard to clean up any sign of the violence at the farm, because the grandkids love coming round. He ripped up the bloodstained concrete slab where Mellie lay, and he repaired all the bullet holes.
“I didn’t know if I could live here after this, but I’ve had the place over 20 years. I can’t see me living anywhere besides here. I have to find the beautiful memories and forget the sad ones.”
They met when he was sheriff and she worked as a receptionist at SunTrust Bank. When he got a state grant for a domestic violence program, he hired her to coordinate it.
Both divorced, they started dating, at first trying to keep it on the sly, because she worked for him. About nine years ago, they married.
He already had told people he would not seek re-election when his term is up in 2008. He’s 66; Mellie was 51. They had planned to travel to mountains, in Colorado and Wyoming, and in Tennessee and North Carolina.
“I don’t know what I will do now. If I retire, I’ve got nobody to go with me, and who wants to travel by yourself?”
He still wears his wedding ring, and he still has Lady, a friendly black pound dog that he loves. “She broke camp on me that day,” he said. “I thought she’d been shot, but she just ran. She wouldn’t go after anybody unless they had a biscuit in their hand.”
McDaniel said he’s thought about running for the local state representative seat in 2008, see if maybe he can’t straighten out a few state laws. But he hasn’t decided.
“I’m just sort of stunned and numb,” he said. “Everything has slowed down.”
Late the night his wife was murdered, McDaniel and other family members were taken to a Marianna church while officers finished work out at the house. McDaniel asked the pastor if there was someplace he could be alone for a few minutes.
Inside the pastor’s office, McDaniel said he got down on his knees and prayed.
“I told God, ‘I don’t know what this is all about, but apparently you’ve got something planned for me, and if you’ll go ahead and let me know what you want me to do, I’ll get it done.’ ”
He’s still trying to figure out what that plan is.