January 10, 2006
The Walk Into the Courthouse
The morning of the trial carried the kind of heaviness you feel in your bones. We arrived early, stepping into the courthouse like people bracing for a storm they couldn’t stop. A friend from our small group church came along—quiet support in a room where everything felt louder than it should.
We sat on the right side. Dale and his family sat on the left. No words exchanged—just two camps settling into familiar positions.
The magistrate opened the proceedings, and the witnesses were sequestered. As my dad stepped out of the courtroom, the knot in my stomach tightened. Part of me knew this moment was born nine months earlier, the day we hesitated to press charges. We chose a peace bond, thinking it would calm things down. Instead, it gave Dale nearly a year to rewrite the story, invent grievances, fabricate a gas easement, and twist a deed just to force a survey.
Looking back, I realize delaying justice is its own kind of danger. It gives liars room to breathe and the truth less oxygen to survive.
Opening Statements
The prosecutor was the same person who helped us with the contractor theft a year and a half earlier. When it was time for opening statements, prosecutor Wilson took a measured, almost somber tone. He described two neighbors who had once been friendly—who picked berries together, helped each other, shared property access—now pulled apart by an escalating dispute. Civil disagreements, he said, belonged in civil court, but pointing a gun at your neighbor does not. He emphasized the peace bond, the trespassing, the threat. His opening was calm, clear, and, I thought, fair.
Then Dale’s attorney stood.
His entire body language changed the atmosphere. The jury leaned in; the room tightened.
He launched with:
“These are the neighbors from hell.”
Us.
Not Dale—the man who pulled a gun—but us.
According to him, Dale never pulled a gun. Instead, we allegedly masterminded an elaborate conspiracy to run a waterline through Dale’s land, tear down our fences, accuse him of theft, revoke his permission to hunt, and slowly “absorb” his property—like we were a family-run version of Manifest Destiny.
All I could think was that line from Dodgeball:
“That’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off for him.”
In that moment, I learned that a courtroom isn’t about who tells the truth—it’s about who tells the most convincing story. Even if it’s fiction.
The Police Take the Stand
The officers testified first. For a moment, hope flickered.
Deputy Cole explained how Dale claimed he’d been punched “in the eye and the nose,” yet Cole found no swelling, no redness, not even a mark. He spoke plainly: Dale’s story “didn’t add up” and felt “reactionary”—the testimony of a man responding to an accusation, not reporting a threat.
It should have been powerful.
But then came the problem:
There was no gun recovered.
No weapon found.
And my dad hadn’t been asked what type it was.
A gap in evidence is like a crack in a dam.
The defense would later wedge themselves into that crack and pry it wider. This made it easier to become a he said, he said situation.
Dad Takes the Stand
My dad testified next, and at first his voice was calm and steady. He walked the jury through the day: the berries, the conversation that turned, the axe handle Dale reached for, the moment everything spiraled.
But the defense attorney pounced.
“If you ended the agreement letting Dale hunt,” he asked,
“why didn’t you give up the waterline?”
The question made no legal sense—West Virginia law is clear that a permissive hunting arrangement isn’t a binding easement. The gun incident alone voided any prior goodwill. But the line of questioning wasn’t about law. It was about making my dad look like a man who broke promises. More ridiculous questions followed:
“Do you like beating up old people?”
It was character assassination dressed up as cross-examination.
I’ve worked enough political campaigns to know the oldest trick in the book:
Define your opponent first, and paint the picture you want the public to believe.
Dale’s lawyer wasn’t trying to establish facts—he was trying to rewrite them.
The attorney shifted to insinuating that my dad had called 911 to “get ahead of” Dale seeking medical attention. The prosecutor objected again and again, but the magistrate allowed the line of questioning to grow like weeds around the actual facts.
What held our hope together was the 911 call itself—raw, immediate, uncoached. Proof that, in that moment, my dad believed a gun was pointed at him.
“Blackberry Incident 2.0”
Dale’s wife took the stand and delivered a version of events so inflated it felt like a staged reenactment.
In her story, my dad stormed up the trail in a rage, screaming about stolen staples. She claimed he lunged at Dale, beat him “nonstop,” and that she—somehow—had the strength to pull him off by his shirt.
She described “massive head injuries.”
But the police had noted none.
The medical records showed none.
Their earlier statements mentioned none.
The prosecutor quietly dismantled her story, piece by piece, but the emotional imagery hung in the air. Sometimes people remember the drama long after they forget the facts.
We broke for lunch. I walked outside feeling like the world had tilted slightly off its axis.
Dale’s Performance
When court resumed, Dale took the stand.
He slipped into the “aww-shucks country boy” act he’d perfected—the soft-spoken victim who couldn’t understand why all these terrible things kept happening to him. According to him, he’d never done anything wrong. My dad, meanwhile, had become a rampaging bully who framed him at every turn.
Whenever the prosecutor questioned inconsistencies, Dale slouched in the witness chair, put his head in his hands, and moaned, “I—I just don’t remember… Mr. Slatt beat me so bad.”
But when his own attorney asked questions? He was suddenly articulate, detailed, sharp—naming dates, property lines, conversations from twenty years ago. The performance was blatant, but the magistrate let it play out without interruption.
It was a performance fit for an awards ceremony—and the magistrate let it roll uninterrupted.
Then Dale lied about me—a moment that still shocks me.
He claimed he helped my dad build the house—putting up drywall and insulation. That was my job. I had photographs of myself doing it. None of that mattered. Dale appropriated the memory like he was collecting trophies.
He lied so casually, so comfortably, it almost sounded like truth.
He projected every flaw he carried onto my dad:
His temper.
His cussing.
His habit of carrying a pistol on his hip.
All inverted, all twisted to point back at us.
Dale was the one who often rode with a pistol on his hip, yet he claimed my dad carried a German Luger and “tapped it” while threatening him. While I was supposedly holding my dad back and saying, “Don’t do this.” I might add. The Luger we owned was a WWI relic taken off a German soldier by my great grandfather. It has a known serial number of the officer who it was issued to—not a firearm anyone casually holsters to check fences. It hadn’t been fired since WWI.
My dad never carried a weapon.
Ever.
It was in that moment I realized Dale wasn’t just lying—he was rewriting himself into our lives like a parasite attaching to every memory.
The Collapse
By late afternoon, the trial had devolved into a filibuster—Dale rambling, contradicting himself, spinning stories too fast to catch and too many to swat down. The prosecutor couldn’t possibly rebut them all.
All we could do was hope the jury saw through the fog and focused on the gun.
But they didn’t.
The verdict: Not guilty.
The legal standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and Dale’s attorney had thrown enough garbage into the air to cloud the truth. The trespassing charge only made it worse—property lines blurred by timbering, the shared use of the right-of-way, fences torn down. Confusion became the defense’s greatest ally.
The Aftermath
I wasn’t surprised by the verdict, but the disappointment still cut deep. What lingered wasn’t the not-guilty decision—it was the way my dad had been treated. He did not do well on the stand. He looked unprepared, exposed, almost bewildered by the cruelty coming at him from the defense table. The attorney mocked him openly, twisting his words, smirking as he asked ridiculous questions meant to humiliate rather than reveal truth. By the time it was over, my dad walked out with his head lowered, shoulders slumped, saying nothing. I had never seen him look so defeated.
And Dale couldn’t leave without one last lie.
We owned an old 1919 map—one that showed the property and the long-established right-of-way. That map had been part of our family history; proof of how long the road had existed and how it had been used for generations. My dad must have shown it to Dale at some point years earlier, because as the courtroom emptied, Dale walked straight up to the magistrate and said loudly:
“I let Slatt borrow one of my old maps from 1919. I’d like to have it back.”
It was so brazen, so absurd, that for a moment even the magistrate said nothing. My parents didn’t flinch. They simply gathered their things and shuffled out, drained of the strength to correct even that final lie.
As we stepped into the corridor, I looked back one last time. Dale was still watching me—same grin, same cold, soulless eyes. And in a voice loud enough for only me to hear, he said:
“I’m a free man.”
I turned away and walked out—not because the trial was over, but because in that moment I understood something I hadn’t before:
Truth doesn’t always win, even in rooms built for it. And a man like Dale, now labeled “free,” was a danger no verdict could contain.
It was a quiet ride home. We said very little but we were all thinking the same thing. What will Dale do to us now that he is free?