[MegtheEgg86]

Cathy: 'All he did was torture me.'



Just how joyous of a reunion that was is open to debate.

Moon later told investigators he and Ford had been getting along "great."

...Most family members and restaurant employees seemed to agree. But a few painted a much different picture. Some of the restaurant's employees and early-morning customers quoted Cathy as saying she feared Moon might kill her someday. She also told them she felt like running away at times, but she feared Darvin would only track her down.

Cathy even left behind some evidence to back up such claims in several letters.

"All me and Darv do is argue about stupid things and I don't know what to do," she wrote to a friend on Oct. 14, 1987. "When we were broke up, all he did was torture me. He would come to my house at 4 in the morning and get me all upset just to see me cry. We only got into one fistfight, though, thank God. He knew everything I did, who I did it with. So I thought the best thing to do was to go back with the son of a bitch, just maybe so I could live my life peacefully without being followed everywhere I went. He even had my phone tapped, he said."

...After Ferrell had left the Old Mill, Moon's suspicions began to change to fear.

"About 5 o'clock, I started getting worried...So I got in my car and went into Oakland and I drove all around and didn't see her anywhere. So I went to Mount Storm and drove through there and I didn't see her anywhere. So I came home and said, 'I'm going to report it.' This was about 8 o'clock, I guess, when I reported it. I called the sheriff's department."

The clean-cut, athletic, 32-year-old Ferrell, meanwhile, had headed for the family store a little more than stone's throw away across the rocky Potomac...

Ferrell says he ate his hamburger, did some minor chores and went down the unpaved street to his parents' house to await their return from the doctor's office.

When Joe and Bev Ferrell pulled into their driveway at 6 p.m., they say Paul was in the back yard throwing a ball for his dog to retrieve.

Paul came into the house with them and asked how the mammogram had gone. Fine, he was told. But it would be awhile before they would get the results.

After some more small talk, Paul returned to exercising his dog before heading for the bowling alley, and Joe and Bev went out for a light Ash Wednesday dinner of tomato soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches.

The Ferrells were a close, Catholic, hard-working family that placed a premium on education.

...So it was natural that the seven Ferrell boys go to college, and all did. Only the twins, Paul and David, didn't earn at least a bachelor's degree.

The twins took life a lot easier. That was especially true of Paul, who was more content doing things like playing with his dog, lifting weights with his buddies in a room above the store or pursuing women.

Actually, the women pursued Paul as much as he pursued them. "I don't know how he did it," the more-serious David said. "I'd go for weeks without a date, and he always had two or three women on the line."

What set Paul apart, several of those women say, was his gentle nature in an area where men pride themselves in their tough exteriors.

But Paul's luck with women turned from good to bad in 1987, when he began seeing not one, but two women named Cathy.

It was also at this time, Ferrell admits, that he began making phone calls to bookstores and asking female employees to read a sex-related passage from The New Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book by and for women about how to keep healthy and achieve sexual fulfillment.

By the time Ferrell moved in with Bernard in December, he says, what had started out as a joke had gotten out of hand.

The calls eventually became such a source of embarrassment, Ferrell says, that he actually considered pleading guilty to murder just to save his family the shame of having details about the calls come out in court.

Ferrell says he also continued seeing the other Cathy--Cathy Ford--during this period.

"She was really confused at the time," Ferrell said of Ford. "She wanted out of everything--Darvin, drugs, the restaurant. But she said she knew too much for Darvin to ever let her go. She said the only way she could get away was to either blow the whistle on the drug operation Darvin was involved in, or have him done away with."

"I encouraged her to go to Cathy Bernard's brother, Doug Tressler, who was an undercover agent for the Garrett County Sheriff's Department. I told her he was so good he had even been written up in a national magazine [Woman's Day, March 5, 1985], and she could trust him."

But as Cathy mulled over that option, Ferrell says, she suddenly saw an opportunity as well.

"All of a sudden, she realized that if she brought down Darvin's operation, the field would be open for a new one...We had met at the trailer I had rented in Mount Storm and had planned to move into, and she started talking about using it as a base of operations. She talked about getting either Melvin Cullers or Gene Dove involved because of their tough reputations. And she said I could protect her, since I would probably be the only deputy on the Mountain when Hobert Schell retired."

Ferrell admits he didn't reject the idea out of hand. But since Ford talked mostly about getting out of drugs and not deeper into them, he says he didn't think she was really serious.

He found out otherwise on Feb. 17, 1988.

When Paul entered the Par-Matt Lanes in Oakland between 8:30 and 9 p.m. that night, manager Dennis Reams handed him a telephone message that would change Ferrell's life.

Reams had taken the message from a distraught-sounding young woman who had called for Ferrell a short time earlier. When he told her Ferrell hadn't arrived yet, Reams says the woman asked him to have Ferrell call her as soon as he arrived. She gave him a telephone number, but not a name.

Whoever the woman was, it couldn't have been Bernard. Bernard later testified that she had tried to reach Ferrell at Ferrell's Mart several times that day, but had stopped calling by 6 p.m., because she knew he normally would be on his way to the bowling alley by then.

Bernard made no mention of trying to call Ferrell after that...