Huckabee Gets His Balls Squeezed

By Ward Harkavy Wed., Dec. 5 2007 at 10:46 AM

Categories: COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Candidate's role in paroling sad-sack castrated rapist is exposed. (I also suffer unkind cuts.)

Regarding the recent fuss about hillbilly presidential candidate Mike Huckabee's parole years ago of convicted rapist Wayne DuMond (who went on to rape again) and my March 2001 story about Bill Clinton's involvement, "The Castration of Wayne DuMond: A Pardon That Clinton Didn't Grant," Denis O'Brien writes:

It looks like you're sure to get some national coverage for your idiot 2001 VV article supporting release of rapist Wayne DuMond.

Man, if Huckabee takes shit over this, you really ought to get dumped on. Murray Waas over at HuffPost has been on this case since the beginning. He should have a field day with you. Hey, the First Amendment cuts both way, eh?

How you sleeping anyway? Was it hard on you after you helped get DuMond released only to have him rape and kill some more. And without testicles, too. Wasn't he something? I know you loved the guy. It was a shame the way Clinton wanted him to stay in prison.

Hope you're sleeping well.

Thanks for writing, Denis. No, I'm not sleeping well, but it has nothing to do with my story about DuMond, who was castrated by a crooked sheriff in Arkansas before he even went to trial. I didn't call for DuMond's release, and I didn't say he was innocent. I stand by my story, which I focused on the vigilante castration and wrote in the wake of revelations about Clinton's pardon of billionaire schnook Marc Rich.

Fellow tabloidist Steve Dunleavy was the one who trumpeted DuMond as innocent, way back in 1996. He even cast doubt on whether the rape occurred. See his piece, "A Travesty of Justice: How Gov. Clinton Denied an Innocent Man His Freedom."

DuMond was hardly innocent. After his parole by Huckabee, he moved to Missouri and raped and murdered.

That was after my March 2001 story, which I began this way:

As Wayne DuMond listened last week to billionaire fugitive Marc Rich's explanation that Bill Clinton pardoned him for "humanitarian" reasons, he couldn't help but darkly snicker.

DuMond had been accused of raping a Clinton cousin in 1984 and was hog-tied and castrated before he even went to trial.

He used to be enraged about it, especially when the cracker sheriff, who was a pal of the rape victim's father, scooped up DuMond's balls, put them in a jar, and showed them off.

"They were mine. Those were my testicles," DuMond told a sickened courtroom in 1988. "He didn't have no right to take them and he didn't have no right to show them around and he didn't have no right to flush them down the toilet."

This is yet another Clinton saga of genitalia that fell into the wrong hands.

The rape victim's daddy, mortician Walter E. "Stevie" Stevens, was part of a Democratic machine that ruled the Arkansas Delta and nurtured Clinton's career.

Wayne DuMond, guilty or innocent, didn't have a chance at justice.

As Clinton was abandoning Arkansas for national politics, he stymied DuMond's release from prison, ignoring the judgment of his own parole board in June 1990 that DuMond's continued incarceration was a "miscarriage of justice."

I tracked down DuMond and interviewed him via phone. I also recounted his creepy past:

Releasing Wayne DuMond earlier would have been a tough call, but many people were willing to show the decorated Vietnam veteran mercy, despite his admitted bad past — booze, drugs, mayhem. DuMond has told the tale of how he helped slaughter a village of Cambodians. Later, stationed in Oklahoma, he was charged with participating in the claw-hammer murder of a fellow soldier. Turning state's evidence, he insisted that he merely stood by and watched. In Tacoma, Washington, he accosted a teenage girl, an incident that led to five years of probation.

The fact is that Clinton made the right decision for political reasons, and Huckabee later made the wrong move — releasing DuMond — for stupid reasons. Murray Waas explored the DuMond case in 2002. Read that piece here. And now he's reprising the tale on the Huffington Post.

The only quibble I have with Waas's piece is that he doubts that DuMond was castrated by crooked sheriff Coolidge Conlee. Here's an excerpt from my story about DuMond's castration:

[In 1985, after his arrest for the rape but before his trial] Wayne DuMond was sitting at home, drunk, when two men broke in, hog-tied him, and made him give one of them a blowjob — "just like you made her do," the perp snarled. Then they castrated him with a knife.

One of them, DuMond later said, chortled, "Mr. C would be proud." They left him to be discovered by his children.

Sheriff Conlee strolled into the DuMond home a few hours later. By his own court testimony, related in [Guy] Reel's book, [Unequal Justice,] Conlee scooped up DuMond's testicles from the evidence scene and put them in a matchbox. He drove home, dumped the balls into a fruit jar, and then sped over to Stevens's funeral home. There, Stevens and funeral home employee Regan Hill were waiting. Hill poured formaldehyde over DuMond's balls. Clinton's cousin Stevens recounted later in a deposition that the sheriff said to him, "Here are DuMond's testicles. Do you want to see them?" Stevens, continuing his testimony, recalled, "Of course, they are looking at me, so that was it."

There are lots of bad actors in this sordid tale. DuMond was the worst, but Sheriff Coolidge Conlee was the most corrupt. He wound up doing the wrong thing to DuMond for mostly right reasons. As I wrote in my 2001 story:

DuMond was hardly the most sympathetic character when he crossed paths with Clinton's relatives in late 1984 in [the Arkansas town] Forrest City (named after Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest). He was an anonymous handyman, married with kids. One day, the daughter of prominent mortician Stevie Stevens saw DuMond driving down the road in his pickup. She identified him as the man who had raped her 45 days earlier.

That introduced DuMond to Sheriff Coolidge Conlee, a notorious gambler, bootlegger, dope dealer, and racketeer. He was so corrupt that, as it was later revealed in court, he even used crooked dice to shoot craps against his own deputies. Even as he threw dice in the sheriff's office, Reel writes, he was busting black-run gambling houses, except the ones that paid off his chief deputy, Sambo Hughes.

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