108. Interview with William Fletcher: Part 1
Detective William Fletcher headed the very brief investigation into Anthony Stephens a.k.a. Les Palmer’s death. He has since left Boca Raton’s police department and returned to his hometown of Clemson, South Carolina. Detective Fletcher sits in his office at the Clemson police department with a cup of coffee in one hand, a donut in the other. Sporting a handlebar mustache and a belly that is just beginning to hang over his belt, Detective Fletcher sighs a lot and looks overall aggravated with revisiting this time in his life.
30 August 2011
– You know, I’d already been trying to get out of that city for a while by then, so I won’t put all the blame on Palmer. It’s hard though, to leave a situation like that unless you’ve got some motivation. Once you’ve got settled somewhere, to just uproot everything, it’s hard.
– I’m not as young as I used to be, and my kids were about to start high school when all this was going on. We had to really want to leave to do it, understand? That’s how me and my wife were thinking.
– Yeah, the Palmer case, though. Last case I worked on down there. [Detective Fletcher sips his coffee and shuffles in his seat] You see, I was born and raised here, Clemson.
– Things like Palmer didn’t happen when I was young, back in the eighties. Back then, you were his age, you did something with yourself. Went to college, joined the army, started a career in something, anything. It was either that or become a crack addict, but any which way you went you were fitting into a set category, understand?
– My parents wanted more than anything for me to go to college but they couldn’t afford it, and neither could I. As a kid, I used to envy the people walking around with their Clemson t-shirts on, the university just sitting pretty right there [Detective Fletcher points out the window at Clemson University in the distance] big and beautiful. Then around ‘89, when I began my career as an officer, my feelings turned from envy to pride. I was proud to live in a country with such a well-established tradition of educating its citizens. I was proud to live in a city with such a strong sense of educational value. And I thought things would be the same when I moved down to South Florida.
– At the time I was trying to get away from the cold winters, I was sick of them. Still am. And with FAU so close by in Boca, I figured I might be able to give my kids the same experiences I had coming up near Clemson, only with the beach nearby.
– But it’s nothing like that down there. Not like that anywhere anymore, not with this generation.
– Maybe it’s too easy to go to college now, maybe that’s what it is. Or maybe these kids’ve just got shit for brains. Whatever it is, they aren’t walking around representing their schools like they used to, fraternizing and sitting out on university lawns studying and getting to know each other the way people did when I was coming up.
– I mean, some of them do, but the majority are out there drunk and half naked, raping each other and doing drugs. They’re not walking around smiling and happy, conversing with each other. They’re sitting in their apartments depressed, plotting murder and suicide.
– It’s sad out there, man. I’ve watched it, seen things deteriorate since the early nineties. Sometime over the past twenty years or so, being a student in this country became more a detriment than an advantage. All of a sudden now, public education doesn’t spark that same sense of community, of prosperity. All of a sudden, you’ve got kids out there murdering other kids like it’s a warzone or something.
– Look at the stats [Detective Fletcher begins counting off on his fingers] 1992, Lindhurst High. Four dead. ‘93, East Carter High. Two dead. ‘95, Richland High. Two more. ‘96. Frontier Junior High. Three. ‘97, Bethel Regional High, Pearl High, Heath High. Seven total. Westside, Parker, and Thurston High Schools combined for eight in ‘98. And then there was Columbine, fifteen dead including teachers, students, and the gunmen themselves. And, you know, I saw where it was progressing, too.
– These were nineties middle schoolers and high schoolers doing this stuff, their generation adopting this mentality. Young teens in the nineties, young adults in the 2000’s. Obviously the kids have to grow up, and obviously some of them are going to go to college.
– Wait a little while, I told my wife, and you’ll see. There’s gonna be the same crap happening on college campuses before long. And sure enough, I wake up one morning, turn on the news, and there’s this angry kid holding a gun and cursing up a storm. Bottom of the screen, thirty-three dead at Virginia Tech.
– I almost cried when I saw that. These kids’ve taken the world straight to the bottom of hell.
Who Is Anthony Stephens? 
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