Suspicious fax sent to FBI

Police still haven’t ruled census worker’s death as homicide

By Samantha Swindler and Adam S. Sulfridge / Times-Tribune Staff

The Times-Tribune received a suspicious fax Friday night, which staff immediately turned over to the FBI. The fax came with the “RE” headline of “I Did It” and referenced the death investigation of Bill Sparkman, a census worker whose body was found hanged in Clay County on Sept. 12. 

“I must state the truth,” the fax read, “Bill Sparkman personally didn’t have any enemies, but the Federal government certainly does. So it’s unfortunate that he was representing them when he was out in Clay County. The only good thing to come of this is that the Fed’s (sic) have stopped the census being taken, for now at least.”

The FBI agent handling the Sparkman case said the fax appears to have been sent from an e-mail account. It was signed “Me, Too” but also contained a name that the Times-Tribune has been unable to verify. It was also unclear from where the fax had been sent. 

“Having reviewed the contents, we’re not taking it as a serious admission,” the agent said. “...There’s no way to immediately validate the source, and there’s nothing necessarily in it that you couldn’t get from the news.”

The fax comes after a wave of national media attention, focused on the possibility that Sparkman’s death was fueled by anti-government sentiment in the rural hills of Eastern Kentucky. 

According to reports from the Associated Press, the word “fed” appeared to be written on Sparkman’s body with a felt-tip pen. The AP reported that Sparkman had been hanged, gagged, had his hands bound by duct tape and was found nude.  

Kentucky State Police Public Affairs Officer Don Trosper had previously said that parts of the AP report dealing with “evidentiary” aspects of the case were inaccurate, but declined to specify which reports were incorrect. 

“There’s a lot of rumors and innuendo and speculation out there, and sometimes I would just love to sit down and have said, OK, I could clear it all up,” Trosper said.

But police aren’t releasing any more details in the case and say they haven’t been able to determine if Sparkman’s death by asphyxiation was a homicide. 

“Detectives are working on it daily, it’s still under investigation, and it’s still classified as a death investigation,” Trosper said on Tuesday. “It’s kind of a strange case due to the fact that we cannot rule out anything... usually in an investigation, you can rule out things... and that gives you the opportunity to focus your investigation. With this one, it’s a little perplexing because you can’t rule out one of the three types of death that we’re looking at” — suicide, accidental death or homicide. 

An unusually vague police response to the media has left some questioning how Sparkman’s death could be anything other than murder. 

FBI spokesman David Beyer told reporters, “Our job is to determine if there was foul play involved.” One police investigator, who asked to remain anonymous, told the Times-Tribune that Beyer’s statement indicated law enforcement officials were apparently still entertaining the notions of accidental death or suicide.

One press report indicated that Sparkman’s feet were touching the ground when police found his body. “If his feet were touching and he was hanging from a limb, you’d want to know if it was a broken limb or if the rope slipped,” the investigator continued, saying, “if it appeared his feet were touching when he was tied, it would make you start to think.”

The investigator suggested reporters research the death of David Carradine, an actor whose body was found bound in a closet following death by apparent autoerotic asphyxiation.

At Johnson Elementary, the school where Sparkman often worked as a substitute teacher, family resource director Gilbert Accairdo said staff “have kind of shielded ourselves from those wild rumors. “

He said any suggestion that Sparkman was doing something inappropriate in the woods where he was found would be very “out of character.”

Accairdo said he’d known Sparkman for 12 years, after Sparkman moved to Laurel County from Florida to take a position with the Boy Scouts. He lived in London and was substitute teaching for Laurel County schools while waiting for a full-time position to become available. Sparkman had adopted a son, now age 19, as a single parent. 

The students at Johnson Elementary haven’t asked many questions about Sparkman’s death, although Accairdo said “we deal with it if they ask.” Students wrote cards to Sparkman and his family as a memorial to him following his death. 

“Bill’s mom came up to Kentucky and had never been to the school. She toured the facility, there was some healing there for his mother. She’s a retired high school principal, so she’s well acquainted with education. There was a lot of healing whenever she came over to the school because she had never met Bill’s friends, and Bill’s friends were Johnson staff.”

Accairdo, himself a retired state trooper, said he had warned Sparkman about the dangers of working in rural areas after Sparkman began his census work. 

“I expressed safety to him because you’re going into rural areas... he wasn’t a bit concerned,” Accairdo said.  “I do home visits as a matter of my job. I do them regularly and I’m cautious on everything that I go to.”

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