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Fancy saved by firefighters
It wasn’t a cat stuck high in a tree, but Salem firefighters were on the spot when an area resident needed some help rescuing his pet.
Charles Glore has been hunting raccoons virtually all his life. He’s learned the different howls and barks of a coonhound from when it’s hot on the trail of a varmint to the moment it corners the clever critter up a tree. But what he’s not used to is the muffled yelp of a dog 35 feet below his boots.
That’s where Fancy ended up on her first hunt with Glore in the woods near his home on Zion Cemetery Road in western Crittenden County – nearly a dozen yards straight down a hole that is part of Baker Cave. The registered coonhound remained there for almost three days before Charlie DeBoe and seven others from the Salem Volunteer Fire Department lifted her to safety.
“They used ropes and a harness and went down and got her,” Glore said of the saviors.
“We used it as a training exercise,” DeBoe, who’s known Glore most of his life, said of the Feb. 18 rescue, “This was our first dog, but yes, we had to get a cat out of a tree years ago.”
You’ll forgive Fancy for the slip-up. Despite being a coon-tracker since she was a pup seven years ago, Glore’s stomping grounds were unfamiliar. Fancy was a veteran of the Dycusburg area, where she had prowled the nighttime woods until Glore bartered for her just a few days prior to her mishap.
Glore and friend Timmy Todd had gone coon hunting on a cold February night when Fancy wouldn’t answer the call to head home. Piercing the night with his calls and hearing no return bark, Glore thought this might be a first in his decades of tracking raccoons.
“I thought this was going to be the time I lost one,” he said of his dog.
DeBoe said he suspects Fancy was hot on the trail of a coon and followed it into an entrance to the cave. Once underground and blinded by duty, she slipped and fell a full 12 to 15 feet down the water-logged cavern, he believes.
“It’s a pretty good size cave you can stand in,” DeBoe said. “I don’t know how far it goes back.”
Returning a following day to the site of the hunt and a missing dog, Glore spent three hours after church on a Sunday afternoon traipsing and calling. Finally, Fancy answered back.
“I heard her barking,” he said.
When he located her from the muted bays, he couldn’t believe what he saw. Straight down a hole with a busted fence around it was Fancy.
“I found my dog, but I couldn’t get her out,” the 67-year-old recalled. “I didn’t know how I was going to get her out.”
Factor in his wife, Joanie, and her call to Crittenden County Rescue Squad volunteer Teena York and Fancy was as good as rescued.
“The next thing we knew, Charlie Deboe was kocking on our door ready to help us,” Glore said.
In the gloaming, Glore took DeBoe to the site of Fancy’s fall. Peering down the hole partially clogged with brush and fill, the would-be rescuer suggested it might be best to wait for next daylight to make the save.
“Charlie took me back home and left,” Glore said. “My wife and I started watching some TV and relaxing when around 9:30, we heard a knock on the the door.”
It was DeBoe and two others with the Salem Fire Department with Fancy in tow.
“We were going to go the next day, but there were so many at the firehouse that night that wanted to help, we used it as training,” DeBoe said. “We wanted to help him out. He’s a good guy.”
“They had gone over there in the dark and rescued Fancy from that 35-foot hole in the ground,” Glore said.
DeBoe recalled his old friend’s expression when he first saw Fancy.
“Charles was just like a kid at Christmas.”
Despite being a bit chilled and perhaps a tad hungry, the hound was none worse for the wear.
“That dog was glad to get out,” said DeBoe, who was the one to repel down the cave to hook an all-too-cooperative Fancy to a harness.
She suffered no apparent injuries in the fiasco and was eager to go hunting again as soon as she returned home.
“She’s a pretty good ol’ dog,” Glore said last Thursday morning as he patted Fancy on her head, which was resting on his arm at waist level.
With clear blue skies overhead and a chill in the air, the hunter finished readying the kennels in the back of his truck as he recalled Fancy’s rescue. As he stuffed more straw into the metal boxes for the night’s hunt, Fancy lay on the wet ground beside the truck, having worked up a sweat from whimpering and greeting the new guest who had come to hear her the tale of her rescue.
“She’s going back tonight,” Glore said as he shut a kennel door. “She enjoys it. They’re born and raised for this.”
“They” are the four coonhounds Glore keeps at his house. All take turns sharing in the nightitme hunts, but Fancy may be Glore’s new favorite.
Though anymore he rarely shoots the raccoons his hounds tree, it’s not a sport without the dogs, he adds. There was a day, however, that the pelts from the coons helped pay for school clothes.
As the oldest of six children left without a father when his dad was killed, a nine-year-old Glore became the man of the family, relying on hunting to help feed and clothe the family. Raccoon furs at that time would fetch anywhere from $10 to $20, a hefty sum in the 1950s.
“Old coon hunters... We’d do just about anything to get ‘em out,” Glore said, relating the special bond with their canine hunting partners. “We just want to say thank you to those boys from (Salem) Fire Department and Teena York for a job well done.”
When fire dues come around again in the next few weeks, the old coon hunter plans on paying his again.
“Hopefully, everybody will,” he said.


Jail filling up quicker than expected
With Kentucky leading the nation in the growing number of prisoners, now is a pretty good time to be in the jail business, say some local officials.
Crittenden County recently opened the doors on its new 133-bed, $7.7 million detention center. Already, the rooms are filling up with nearly 100 inmates, many of them state prisoners who create income for the facility.
Crittenden County Judge-Executive Fred Brown says that operating the jail is, as anticipated, very expensive, and in some cases the costs are exceeding projections. However, he thinks the jail is still going to save the county money in the long run.
“I would say that right now is an excellent time to be in the jail business because there are so many inmates out there and available,” he said.
One of the biggest fears four years ago when local leaders started considering whether to build a new jail was whether there would be a sufficient number of paying customers. The Pew Center's Report on States, released last week, found that inmate populations are up nationwide. Kentucky, the study said, is outpacing the rest of the country.
In January, Gov. Steve Beshear in his budget speech said the state’s crime rate was up only three percent in the last 30 years, but inmate population was up 600 percent. Good or bad, that news is quietening some of those original fears that magistrates had when they decided to build a large jail in the hopes that inmates would be available.
“The governor said that crime is flat, but the number of inmates is growing in Kentucky,” said Magistrate Dan Wood.
Wood, who admits he was a bit apprehensive about building a large jail mostly because of the front-end expense, says it's comforting to know that Crittenden County will for the foreseeable future have plenty paying inmates.
Having a jail large enough to keep state prisoners and those from other counties was the key ingredient, Wood said. In theory, those paying inmates foot the bill for the local prisoners – those incarcerated for misdemeanor offenses and for short terms.
“When they showed us all of the charts and graphs regarding new jails, this is where they intersected,” Wood said, pointing to the detention center capable of housing up to a legal limit of 145 inmates when Crittenden generally has 20 or fewer of its own incarcerated.
Kentucky led the nation with a 12-percent jump in inmate population in 2007, according to the Pew report that says for the first time ever, more than one in every 100 American adults is serving time in jail or prison. Kentucky’s inmate population grew by 2,402 during 2007. The state held 20,000 inmates on Dec. 31, 2006, and 22,402 on Jan. 1, 2008, according to the study. Most of them are Class D felons, the same type that the Crittenden County Detention Center is certified to keep. The state pays the county about $31 a day for housing those prisoners.
Judge Brown said the county recently received its first payment from the state for Class D inmates. The check was for more than $10,000 which covered a small amount of prisoners kept in January, the jail's first month of operation.
Now, two months into operating the new jail, Crittenden County is housing 90 inmates. Of those, 83 are paying prisoners. Seventy-five of those are state prisoners and seven are from other counties. Seven are local prisoners. Ironically, that's the fewest number of local inmates the county jail has held in the past three years.
While that's already making the bottom line look better, Brown said expenses are astronomical.
“We're going to have to refigure our electricity costs,” he said. “We had projected about $70,000 for power, but it's going to be more like $90,000.”
The February power bill for the jail was $6,400.
Crittenden County Jailer Rick Riley said that the jail is filling up much faster than he or anyone else anticipated.
“Crittenden County did the right thing and got into the jail business at the right time,” said Riley. “There is no way under the sun that I would have dreamed we'd have 90 prisoners just 50 days into operating the new jail.”
Despite the fast growth, Riley said there have been no major problems. The jail currently employees 25 guards, but it will ramp up to about 40 once the facility is full.
“In the next two months I fully expect to have 120 inmates,” Riley said. “If it keeps going like it has, we might even be full in two months.”
The jailer says there are still butterflies in some stomachs when it comes to operating a jail as large as the new detention center.
“There are a whole lot of bills to pay,” he said. “But in the long run, I feel really confident that the jail is going to help the county coffers and take some burden off the budget. It's not going to happen overnight, but we're filling this jail up faster than I ever dreamed.”

Police seeking suspect in child pornography case
Marion Police Department is investigating a possible child pornography case and are looking for a man who allegedly left town after he learned that police were on to him.
Officers George Foster and Bobby West were working on an unrelated case a couple of weeks ago when their questioning of a teenage girl led them to a home at 119 Old Salem Road in Marion.
From that residence on Feb. 24, officers took into evidence 1,933 items, including CDs, DVDs, VHS videotapes, three computers, eight computer hard drives and three digital cameras and video recorders.
Based on the electronic evidence found on those items, police charged Billy Wayne Holland, 49, of the same address with one count of possession of matter portraying sexual performance by a minor. When officers went back to the home to serve an arrest warrant, the day after searching the house, Holland was gone.
"We missed him by five hours," said Patrolman Foster. "We moved on this as quickly as possible, but by the time we went back, he was gone."
Foster said officers found one photograph on one of the computers that showed a minor female in a topless pose. That, he said, was enough for police to make an arrest, so they immediately quit going through the evidence and went to take the suspect into custody.
"We think he could be in Paducah, maybe North Carolina," Foster said. "He had moved to Marion in January. Prior to that he was living in Lyon County."
The man's name and description have been entered into the national criminal database operated by the FBI so that if he's stopped anywhere in the nation, he will be arrested.
Rather than take a chance on damaging electronic evidence that may be remaining on the computer hard drives, Marion police have sought the assistance of trained specialists with the Kentucky State Police Electronic Crimes Division. State computer detectives will be going through the hard drives on the computers. They are even able to retrieve items that have been erased. The investigators will also be looking through hundreds of homemade DVDs and CDs taken from Holland's home.
Police say that based on their preliminary look at the evidence, there may have been several under-age females, ages 14-17, involved in the case.
Anyone with information regarding Holland's whereabouts is urged to contact the Marion Police Department or call the Tipline at 965-3000 and remain anonymous.