For J. Tom Morgan, it started with a simple page to call his office. When he called back, he was told that DeKalb Sheriff-elect Derwin Brown had been shot.
Morgan first thought there had been some sort of accident, but he quickly discovered the situation was much worse: that rainy night in December 2000, three days before he was to be sworn in as DeKalb’s new sheriff, Brown had been murdered in his own suburban driveway. Members of his family were inside the house, awaiting his return from a party celebrating the completion of his state training before taking office as sheriff. The gunmen had escaped.
Morgan, then DeKalb’s District Attorney, the top prosecutor, and other law enforcement officers soon found themselves investigating what turned out to be a almost-unimaginable crime, a local political assassination.
“I really believe we were in shock and disbelief,” Morgan said during a phone interview from Cullowhee. N.C., where he now teaches at Western Carolina University. “I never will forget when I pulled the [hospital] sheet back and saw Derwin’s bullet-riddled body. … I’ll never forget those first 24 to 36 hours.”
Now. more than a quarter century later, Morgan recounts those hours and the months of investigations and trials that followed in his new book, “A Rainy Night in Georgia, a Lawman’s Brutal Murder, a Rogue Southern Sheriff, and a Prosecutor’s Quest for Justice” (Prometheus Books). Morgan calls the book, written with John Capouya, a “true crime memoir.”
Morgan knew Brown slightly. Brown, a veteran cop, surprisingly upset incumbent DeKalb Sheriff Sidney Dorsey in an election a couple of months before the shooting. Morgan had run into Brown on the campaign trail as he pursued his own re-election that summer, and, before that, Brown had testified in a trial Morgan prosecuted, but that was about it.
Morgan discussed his book on a new episode of consumer investigator Dale Cardwell’s “Trust Issues” podcast called “Whistleblowers: The Price of Truth.”
Cardwell worked in 2000 as an investigative reporter at an Atlanta television station. Morgan credits Cardwell’s TV reports as playing a large part in events leading to investigation of Dorsey’s office and subsequently to Brown’s murder.
Cardwell’s reporting exposed corruption in Dorsey’s department, including on-duty deputies working for the sheriff’s private security company and doing other private work. Those reports led to a corruption investigation by Morgan’s office. Brown promised voters he would clean up the department.
After Brown was shot, police officers went to Cardwell’s home and, fearing he might be a target as well, said he should take his family to a hotel. Cardwell said the officers told him, “We thought you would be dead, too.”
At one point, Morgan discovered that both he and Cardwell had been a list of potential victims the assassins had put together before shooting Brown. Morgan said he started carrying a gun for the first time.
“It was surreal,” Cardwell said during a recent interview at the offices of TrustDale, his consumer protection company. After a couple of weeks, Cardwell took his family to his home in Kentucky to evade the conspirators.
Dorsey did not handle his defeat well. Morgan believes Dorsey couldn’t handle losing the power he enjoyed as sheriff, a job with little to no oversight in Georgia. “Power corrupts, if we don’t have checks and balances,’ Morgan said. “It can get way out of hand.”
Cardwell agrees that Dorsey, who had been a veteran Atlanta police officer, was undone by his power as sheriff. “I think two things: absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he said, “and that [Dorsey] had surrounded himself with a circle of ‘yes people.’”
Morgan and Cardwell also say that Dorsey believed that if Brown were out of the way, then Dorsey himself would be re-appointed sheriff and then would win the office in a special election. He directed four men who had jobs in the sheriff’s office or who wanted to work there to murder Brown. “These were four people [who] would do anything for this man,” Morgan said.
Morgan ultimately granted immunity to two of the men, Patrick Cuffy and Paul Skyers, so they would agree to testify truthfully against Dorsey and the others. Two other men, Melvin Walker and David Ramsey, were acquitted of the murder charges in a trial in DeKalb County but later were convicted of related federal charges and sent to prison.
Dorsey was convicted of murder and racketeering in a trial that was moved to Albany, Ga., because of extensive pre-trial publicity in Atlanta. Morgan served as lead prosecutor for the trial, which ended up being held in the town where he grew up. Dorsey eventually admitted to investigators that he had ordered Brown’s killing but claimed he tried to call it off. Dorsey died in prison in March of this year.
Morgan said that after the extensive trials and appeals, he kept trial transcripts and his notes. The events of Brown’s murder and Dorsey’s conviction often were retold in documentary films, he said, but he always felt something was lacking. He asked other authors to consider writing a true crime book about the case but was told he should write it himself. Six years ago, he started. Early drafts, he said, were too lawyerly, so he called in a professional writer for help.
Now that the book is out, he said, he sees that in addition to showing the need to monitor the corruption of powerful local officials, “it’s a call for public service,” he said. “My students have read it and said, ‘I didn’t know it would be so much fun to be a prosecutor.’ If this book can inspire young people to public service, I feel better about it.”
Cardwell said he featured Morgan and his book in his podcast because the story was a good jumping-off point to talk about the need for whistleblowers who expose corruption from inside government institutions or businesses. His investigations of Dorsey’s corruption started, he said, after a fellow customer recognized him in line at a Dairy Queen and wanted to talk about goings-on at the DeKalb sheriff’s office.
“When institutions fail, people lose faith in them,” Morgan said. “We need to keep working and to work hard to make sure these institutions — like a sheriff’s office, a prosecutor’s office – can be trusted.”
Morgan remembers meeting Brown at a political event in 2000, shortly after he’d won election as sheriff. Morgan said he told Brown that they needed to talk after he took office about corruption prosecutors had found in the sheriff’s office.
“He said, ‘Fine. I look forward to working with you.’ That’s the last thing we said to each other.”
