The Killing of Alydar
Once upon a time he was one of the fastest thoroughbreds in the world. In 1990 he was put down after breaking his leg—an accident, it was assumed, until last year.
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Tomala also verified that Lundy had a big problem with the insurance companies that held multimillion dollar "equine mortality" policies on Alydar. In 1990 they were threatening to cancel those policies because of Calumet's slowness in paying its premiums. Lundy had been forced to send Matthews and his own sister, who handled the insurance on Calumet's horses, to London to beg exasperated Lloyd's representatives to give them one more chance—which they did. But the head of another equine insurance company, Golden Eagle Insurance out of California, told Lundy's sister in the early fall of 1990 that he had reached the end of his patience with Calumet's delinquent payments. He said the company's policy on Alydar would not be renewed when it expired in December.
Tomala realized that if there was a perfect time for Alydar to die, it was precisely in November 1990, just after Frank Cihak's resignation and just before one of Alydar's insurance policies expired. She looked at another record. Calumet had indeed used Alydar's insurance proceeds to make its payment to First City Bancorporation and staved off foreclosure for a few more months.
For Tomala, there was only one person who could have had Alydar killed: J. T. Lundy. And she was determined to prove it.
The question was, how could anyone prove, seven years after the fact, that a racehorse had been murdered? Tomala had no experience investigating murders. Neither did Rob Foster, the young FBI agent assigned to work with her. Yet here they were in Kentucky, and it didn't take them long to understand that they were not welcome. Few people wanted to speak to them. Those who did said that Lundy couldn't possibly be a horse killer. They pointed out that on the night of Alydar's injury, November 13, 1990, Lundy got on the phone and begged the best veterinary orthopedic surgeon in Kentucky, Larry Bramlage, to try to save Alydar's life.
One of the first people Tomala and Foster interviewed was Tom Dixon, a mild-mannered, churchgoing Lexington insurance adjuster who had been hired by Lloyd's of London to handle its equine claims. Dixon was one of the first non-Calumet employees to arrive the night Alydar was injured, and according to the notes he took, it was Lundy who told him that Alydar was known to kick his stall violently and that he had no doubt broken his leg kicking the stall. Dixon had taken some photos and had conducted a few interviews, including one with the night watchman, Alton Stone, a muscular farmworker with shaggy blond hair. Sitting in on that interview was one of Lundy's assistants, Susan McGee, who occasionally interrupted Stone to explain to Dixon what Stone meant to say. Dixon asked few follow-up questions of Stone or anyone else. He was a sympathetic man who felt bad for what had happened to the horse. He quickly filed a report saying the death was accidental, and he had Lloyd's of London's money to Calumet within thirty days. "The fastest payoff in history," he later said proudly.
There was another Lexington insurance adjuster who had tried to get into the farm the night of the injury, but he was prevented from getting past the front gates by a security guard, who said he was not allowed to let anyone in. When Terry McVey, representing Golden Eagle (the company that was not renewing its coverage of Alydar), was finally allowed in the stallion barn the next afternoon, he was amazed to find that Alydar's stall had been mopped and swept and that the heavy roller outside the door, the one that supposedly had been knocked loose from Alydar's kicks, had already been repaired and rebolted to the floor.
Why, he wanted to know, would Calumet employees so quickly clean up the evidence that suggested how Alydar had died? And why, if Alydar had been such a kicker as Lundy had said, were there no marks on the stall door consistent with heavy kicking? All horse farms would regularly add padding to the stalls of horses that kicked. Surely if the prized Alydar had been a kicker, Lundy would have had pads on Alydar's walls for his own protection.
Yet in the end, Golden Eagle officials decided not to challenge the circumstances regarding Alydar's death, and they too paid off the claim. "It was as if those who made a living off the big horse farms—like the insurance adjusters and the veterinarians—realized it was not in their best interests to rock the boat," Tomala says now. "Why risk losing any future business by asking too many questions?" Even breeders from competing farms were hesitant to talk about an event they knew could make the entire industry look bad. "There was this fear that a scandal about Alydar would deeply hurt the public's perception of horse racing," says Tomala. "So people started circling the wagons."
The veterinarians who had examined Alydar said they were firmly convinced that his injury was accidental: The horse had kicked the door, and the busted roller was proof. The roller was contained in a heavy metal bracket, about six inches long, that was bolted to the floor just outside Alydar's sliding stall door. The roller kept the stall door on its track. Because Alydar's fracture was the "torquing" type that happens when a horse twists its leg, the veterinarians theorized that when he knocked the roller loose with his kick, the stall door moved outward, thus opening a gap between the dislodged door and the wall of the stall. Alydar must have caught his leg in that gap, and in his struggle to get free, twisted his leg until it broke.
When Tomala and Foster asked to see an x-ray of Alydar's fracture, Lynda Rhodes Stewart, a former veterinarian at Calumet, told them it had mysteriously disappeared from her files less than a year after Alydar's death. They asked her if she remembered anything else about that night that seemed unusual. Well, she said, when Alton Stone had called her to say that something was wrong with Alydar, he had never indicated that Alydar's condition was serious. He told her only to come up when she had a chance.
On June 4, 1997, when Foster and Tomala finally tracked down Stone at a construction site where he was working, he nervously recounted for them the same story he had told insurance adjuster Tom Dixon. He said the regular night watchman, Harold "Cowboy" Kipp, had asked him to work for him that evening so he could have a night off. Between eight-thirty and nine-thirty in the evening, Stone said, he was sitting on a turned-over, five-gallon bucket in an office of the stallion barn, talking to a security guard whose job it was to drive the perimeter of the farm. Around nine-thirty, they drove over to the canteen to buy some sodas and returned ten to fifteen minutes later. Stone went back inside the stallion barn while the security guard returned to his rounds. It was then that he saw Alydar.
To verify Stone's story, Foster interviewed the security guard, Keed Highley, who told him he had never been interviewed by anyone about Alydar's death. Foster was stunned when Highley told him that he had not sat in that office with Stone but that he had stopped by the stallion barn at about ten to call his wife from a telephone there. When he approached the barn, he said, he saw Stone leaving. Highley noticed that the lights were on in the farm office—Lundy's office—which was attached to the barn. As he spoke to his wife on the phone, Highley heard the stallion whinny. He investigated, saw the horse's leg dangling, and then radioed Stone to call a veterinarian. For the first time, Foster realized there was a cover-up going on. It was Highley, not Stone, who had found Alydar.
Foster also found the original night watchman, Cowboy Kipp. Kipp's primary job was to take care of the stallions, specifically Alydar, and he had rarely missed a night of work since starting at the farm. He loved his job so much that he wouldn't even take vacations. In fact, when Foster found him, Kipp was still working as a night watchman at Calumet. (After filing for bankruptcy, the farm had been sold at auction for a mere $17 million to a Polish born investor named Henryk deKwiat- kowski, who lived there only part-time and who maintained a skeletal staff.)
Once again, no one—no insurance adjuster or reporter—had talked to Kipp. If they had, they would have been told a chilling story. About five days before Alydar's injury, Kipp said, he was at work on the farm when a dark blue Ford Crown Victoria with tinted windows drove up. A large man got out of the car. Kipp said he had seen the man in the main office a couple of times, but he didn't know his name or what he did for Calumet. The man told Kipp that the farm's management was worried he was getting burned out. Kipp needed to take a day off. "How about Tuesday, November 13?" the man said. Although Kipp didn't think he needed a break, he was the kind of employee who followed orders and didn't cause trouble. He did take that evening off, but he insisted to Foster that he never asked Stone to substitute for him.
Throughout 1997, Tomala had several of the witnesses—including Alton Stone, Keed Highley, and Cowboy Kipp—flown separately to Houston to tell their stories to a federal grand jury that had been secretly convened just to hear evidence about Alydar. In January 1998 that grand jury indicted Stone for perjury for telling numerous false stories to federal agents and to the grand jury itself. Obviously Tomala's strategy was to squeeze Stone (few people are indicted for perjury in federal court) to see if he would reveal what else he knew. Stone's court-appointed defense attorney said Tomala had become obsessed with conspiracy theories about Alydar's death. It was a charge Tomala could not deny. In a trial brief, she said that Stone was part of a plot to harm the horse.
As for Lundy, he had kept a low profile since his resignation from Calumet, staying mostly in Florida, where he was training horses at a small farm. Although he had declared personal bankruptcy in 1992, few people imagined he was really broke. An accountant who had studied the Calumet books said Lundy had paid himself nearly $6 million during his tenure. He did show up at a Lexington lawyer's office for a deposition regarding his bankruptcy. He took the Fifth Amendment more than two hundred times while fidgeting, rubbing his eyes, and chewing on his fingernails. Irritated, an attorney asked Lundy if he would just tell him the color of the shirt he was wearing. "I think it's red," Lundy said after consulting with his attorney.
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