Head Shot by Burl Barer

eighteenth, I got off work at about eleven P.M. ,” recalled Schneider. “I went to Lively Market on Forty-fifth and Pacific to buy groceries for a baseball tournament the next day. There were people in the store who said they had just been to the Rush concert. While at the store, I saw Paul St. Pierre and Andrew Webb buying beer. When they left, they got into a 1971 light gold Dodge Challenger, and I noticed someone else in the car—a guy in the backseat. Then I went to spend the night at Silver Lake with some friends. I got up about seven A.M. to go to the baseball tournament. I was driving up with Paul Barabe and his girlfriend, Cheryl. We drove up to Elbe and took a right at the bridge, and on the right side of the road, I saw the same car that I had seen the night before—it was the gold Challenger—in the ditch. There was also another car parked on the side of the road, and there were several people standing outside of it. Two of the people appeared to be Paul St. Pierre and Andrew Webb; we didn’t stop, we just kept going.” Another person in a separate car, Jack McQuade, also noticed Andrew Webb’s Challenger. “Alongside the Challenger,” confirmed McQuade, “was an old white station wagon.”
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    â€œWe continued questioning Chris St. Pierre,” Yerbury later explained, “and I asked him what happened in the days following the burial of John Achord. Well, once again Chris St. Pierre told us everything, and—” He stopped, drummed his fingers on the desk, and shook his head as if trying to clear away a lingering, unwanted, image. “OK,” he said, “this is the part where they go out there in the middle of the night, dig up the body, chop off the head, and bring it home in a bucket.”
    â€œThey had that head in a bucket, set in concrete, sitting right over there,” Mark Ericson later recalled, pointing toward the back wall. “There was a five-gallon orange bucket, filled with cement. I didn’t really notice it much, but I finally asked Chris, ‘What’s with this bucket of cement right here?’ He says, ‘Oh, my dad was doing some work on this porch, some cement, and he had some extra left over, so I just grabbed that bucket and filled it up.’ Well, then the next day or so, the bucket was gone. I never thought of it at all, until. . .” Mark Ericson stopped speaking as an involuntary shudder made its way through his body. “Stuff like that just makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, you know what I mean?”
    â€œThey actually had a reason—or excuse—for removing his head,” stated Yerbury. “Paul St. Pierre was concerned that somehow we—the police—would make a connection between the bullet recovered from the black fellow he shot at the grocery store and the bullet recovered from the head of John Achord, if he was ever found. I guess the same concern might have prompted Paul St. Pierre to throw away the gun, but he kept the gun and attempted throwing away Mr. Achord’s head. The way Chris St. Pierre described things, it sounded rather ghoulish.”
    â€œPaul and I decided to put the head in a five-gallon bucket and fill it with cement,” confirmed Chris St. Pierre. “Paul and I went back up to where we had buried the second guy that Paul had shot, and then dug up the body. I made Paul do the digging up of the body with the shovels we got earlier from my father, the same tools that we used to bury him a couple days earlier.”
    While digging, Paul St. Pierre accidentally broke one of the shovels. His younger brother used the broken handle to mix and stir the concrete while Paul went to the car, got the ax, and chopped off John Achord’s head.
    â€œAfter placing the head in the bucket,” said Chris St. Pierre, “we put the lid on it, put it in my car along with the tools, and then reburied the body. Before leaving, we