What’s in the news: Bobby Medford arrested

Jason Sandford

Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.

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Headlines unused so far:
Feds hit jackpot, arrest ex-sheriff and former deputies
Medford craps out
Medford rolls snake eyes
Number’s up for Medford
Game over for former sheriff

So y’all have heard the news. Former Buncombe County Sheriff Bobby Medford was arrested Thursday and charged with extorting money from the owners of video poker machines. The federal indictment says Medford used his office’s muscle to protect owners of the machines from law enforcement action, and he used his men to pressure video poker machine owners into paying him for that protection. There’s a whole lot more, of course, that you can read herehereand here for starters.

Not sure what to say about it all. I’ve watched Medford since the day he took office in 1994. He went into office a well-liked guy who worked his way up from a patrol officer who started his law enforcement career decades earlier with the Asheville Police Department but who was selling cars at Black Mountain Chevrolet when he first won. Medford earned a reputation as an investigative cowboy who oversaw one of Buncombe County’s most infamous murder cases – the Karen Styles homicide.

Medford led the interrogation of Richard Allen Jackson, but it was good work by good deputies that sealed the case.

The case that would haunt Medford was the death of a North Buncombe teen apparently snatched from her bus stop as she waited to go to school. Mary Judd’s body was found in a ditch. She’d been strangled and raped. Medford’s deputies arrested and charged two men, who sat in jail for two years before finally walking free. Medford had the wrong guys. Another man was eventually convicted of the Judd murder, but the case showed Medford’s reckless side.

Although the new federal indictments focus on about the last five years of Medford’s tenure, rumors always swirled around the taciturn man who broke in young reporters with a nasty joke, smoked like a chimney in his office despite a ban on smoking in county offices and had severe back pain that would result in surgeries and eventually never allow him to stand up straight.

There were gambling rumors way back then. One of his former deputies, Miles Webb, was convicted in federal court for his activity in a gambling operation that brought down one of the Asheville Police Department’s top cops of the 1990s, Ronnie Davis. (Not to be confused with Butch Davis, who has been indicted along with Medford. Ronnie Davis was known for raising money for charity by sitting up on a Patton Avenue billboard for days on end.)

There were rumors that Medford had been charged with domestic abuse and therefore not allowed to carry a gun as a law enforcement officer, but nobody could ever find paperwork to back that up. There were rumors that he used his county car to drive down to Georgia, but nobody ever nailed it down. There were rumors that once in office, he ran the town of Woodfin and had the political power to determine who was in and who was out there.

So in the end, seeing a bowed Bobby Medford shuffle out of the federal courthouse in handcuffs doesn’t surprise.