By Monte Mitchell
JOURNAL REPORTER
When it came time for Ron Hudler to retire in 1992 after a successful career as an auto executive, he came home to the family farm in Grassy Creek.
Hudler had already planted thousands of Fraser firs on the hillsides where he and his twin brother had spent their childhood summers.
There was a house on the farm, which his father had built for his own retirement, but it needed remodeling.
Hudler needed a good handyman, and he hired a skilled carpenter who had moved to Ashe County not too long ago.
The handyman was Freddie Hammer.
Hammer had settled in Ashe about two years after his release from a Pennsylvania prison to run a convenience store for his stepfather, who had visited the area on drives back and forth between his home in the Florida Keys and Pennsylvania.
On the first day the store opened, Hammer met the woman who would become his third wife. The store eventually closed, but it helped Hammer establish himself in his new home.
He started a firewood business, posting signs along Old N.C. 16 for Freddie P's Firewood. And he took odd jobs, doing plumbing, carpentry and landscaping.
In 1992, he married Brenda Blevins Roark, and they and her son lived in a frame house in Crumpler that had been her grandmother's.
A smooth manner
Hammer impressed his in-laws with his work ethic. They never saw him lose his temper. They thought of him as happy-go-lucky, someone who often sang or whistled on the job.
He didn't talk much about his past in Philadelphia, not even to his wife, although she knew that he had served time for killing a Philadelphia police officer, although he was acquitted after a second trial. He was friendly, with a smooth voice that matched his manner. He was a lay leader and taught Bible study to children at a Methodist church.
He was an extravagant tipper, leaving $20 when much less would do. He had an expensive, modern camper in Cripple Creek, Va., about an hour north of his home. He parked it at a campground on 27 acres there owned by a friend from Ashe County. The campground backs up to thousands of acres of national forest with miles of horse trails. They would haul horses up and spend the weekends riding.
And Hammer was known to brag about his rich friend, Ron Hudler. It was nothing unusual, he said, to ride around in Hudler's truck with a half-million dollars on the seat between them. People weren't sure that was true, but that's what he said.
But Hammer's relatives sometimes wondered how he had enough money to do the things he did.
They heard stories about him getting the money up front for landscaping jobs and never finishing the work. They knew that he had written bad checks and owed money around the county. When they saw landscaping timbers or mulch for sale in front of his house, they figured that he had overcharged someone on a job again and was selling the extra supplies.
The sheriff's office heard about him, too. There was the time, for example, that a widow called the Ashe County Sheriff's Office right after Hammer had delivered wood. A piece of farm equipment was missing.
A detective called Hammer and told him that the woman didn't want to press charges. She just wanted it returned.
Investigators didn't hear any more about it. They didn't even know whether Hammer had stolen anything. But it put him on their radar as someone to keep an eye on.
Back to the mountains
Hudler's parents had been part of the migration of thousands of Appalachian people who had followed the so-called Hillbilly Highway from the mountains to factory jobs in Detroit and the rest of the industrial heartland.
Hudler and his twin brother, Don, were born in Detroit in 1934, during the Depression. They both graduated from Ohio Wesleyan College and went to work for General Motors.
Hudler was a data-processing executive whose work took him to Europe and major U.S. cities. When GM bought Electronic Data Systems in 1984, Hudler became an EDS vice president. He had 6,000 people working for him and one year sent a bill to GM for $1.5 billion. Don Hudler came up through the marketing side and eventually became president of GM's Saturn Corp.
Hudler harvested his first 4,000 trees the year he retired.
Three years later, he won the industry's highest honor. One of his Fraser firs was chosen for the White House Christmas tree. A horse-drawn carriage carried the 18½-foot tree to the South Lawn, where Hudler presented it to first lady Hillary Clinton. A picture of him with Clinton hangs in the farm office in West Jefferson.
Hudler's three sons eventually joined him in the tree business. Dale became operations manager for the Hudler Carolina Tree Farms. Bill Hudler lived near his father and worked on the farms. Fred Hudler came in 1995, after a career in advertising in Michigan. He lived down the road. Ron Hudler owned hundreds of acres in Ashe and Grayson counties, and leased other land in the region.
In his second career, Hudler was part businessman, part country gentleman. He hunted, fished and collected guns. He also collected fine wine, for a time storing his purchases in Hammer's cellar. Hudler rode Harley-Davidsons and ran marathons, until his knees gave out.
Hudler was a gregarious man, and he shined at trade conventions. He was also known for his generosity and concern for the migrant workers who harvested his trees. He was board chairman of the N.C. Department of Labor's health and safety committee, and he held safety meetings at his farm for other farmers. Advocates for migrant workers would use him as an example of how to provide safe and decent housing. He equipped his four migrant camps with cable television, washers and dryers.
Helping out on odd jobs
After the renovations to Hudler's house were done, Hammer stayed on doing carpentry work and other odd jobs around the farm. His wife worked as Hudler's housekeeper, cooking and buying groceries and watering the plants when he was out of town.
For a while, Hammer was a full-time employee for Hudler. But he quit after they couldn't agree on money, although he continued to help with the occasional odd job.
When Hudler wanted to bring a gun safe he kept in Michigan down to the farm, he hired Hammer.
Hammer hauled the 6-foot-high safe from Detroit to the 10-bay garage in Grassy Creek.
He watched Hudler open it, and knew that it took two keys to unlock the steel doors.
Bob Porter, a neighbor in Cripple Creek, thought that Hammer was one of the nicest guys around. But he didn't believe everything Hammer told him. For example, Hammer once bragged that he had sold $180,000 of firewood in a year.
The truth was that Hammer was in constant financial trouble.
In December 2002, Hammer and his wife filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy for themselves and the firewood business. Chapter 7 allows a trustee to liquidate the property and pay off creditors.
The Hammers listed $258,742 in liabilities and $60,165 in assets. The biggest portion of the debt was $118,930 for the balance on the mortgage on their house, but the Hammers also owed thousands of dollars to banks, building-supply companies, contractors and other creditors. Hammer estimated his take-home pay as $1,000 a month, the same as his wife's.
The case was discharged in March 2003, meaning that his creditors could no longer collect certain debts. The next month, the Hammers filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, a process for people who are temporarily unable to pay their debts but would like to pay them in installments over time.
The couple agreed to pay $39,690 to satisfy their debts, but they paid only about a fourth of that. The court lifted its protection on April 25, 2005, because of inadequate payments. The next month, they filed again for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection.
In May 2006, the court approved the sale of the Hammers' house to prevent foreclosure. The property was bought by Lee McMillan, one of Brenda Hammer's distant cousins and the owner of a popular Ashe County restaurant called Shatley Springs. The Hammers continued to live in the house and were supposed to make mortgage payments to McMillan. But they didn't.
"The biggest mystery of my life is knowing where his money goes," McMillan said. "I couldn't understand it."
A claim of back wages
Hammer's struggling firewood business wasn't a one-man job. He had an employee. His name was Jimmy Blevins, and he was a nephew from his wife's side of the family.
Blevins helped Hammer deliver firewood. He also did odd jobs for him in Cripple Creek.
But Hammer wasn't paying him, at least not regularly. By Blevins' math, Hammer owed him $1,605 in back wages through February 2007.
He wanted his money, and he started asking around about how to take Hammer to small-claims court.
Blevins lived in a run-down trailer on his grandparents' property, which made some people think of him as a hermit. But his family knew him as a good boy, someone who came up the hill two or three times a day to visit his grandparents. He called his mother nearly every day, talking to her for hours, and his friends and family deeply loved the boyish man who liked to cut up and carry on. He loved to garden. He fished in the river near his home, catching trout and turtles. He hunted and put up venison.
And he loved to drink beer.
Hammer was shocked when Blevins told him that he drank 18 beers a day.
Here's what you do, Hammer told him. The first week, keep 18 cans of beer in your refrigerator each day. If you don't drink them all, that's great. But don't drink more. The next week keep 17 cans a day; 16 the next week and so on.
Hammer tells the story of how friends thought it curious one time when Blevins wanted water instead of a beer. "I'm on the Freddie P. Diet," he said.
Blevins' friends and relatives scoff at Hammer's talk of helping Blevins. They had begun to see Hammer as a smooth-talking con man, someone who could tell a lie to your face and make you believe it.
They also knew that Hammer had killed a Philadelphia police officer, but they didn't know much about it.
The killing of Charlie Uffelman nearly 30 years ago was still on Hammer's mind.
On Feb. 14, 2007, he picked up the phone and dialed the house in Philadelphia where the officer's widow still lived.
When Joan Uffelman answered, she almost dropped the phone.
Hammer had said he wanted to talk to her for a long time. He wanted to apologize, and ask forgiveness. He wanted to tell her that he didn't intend to kill her husband. It just happened.
That's not how Joan Uffelman remembers the conversation. She said that Hammer told her that he had lied on the witness stand.
"He didn't say, 'I'm sorry," she said. "He said, 'I want you to know that everything I said in that trial I was told to say, and it was a lie."
A few days after the phone call, Hammer went to see a lifelong friend of Blevins, a man named Bobby Blevins, who told Hammer that Jimmy Blevins was talking about taking him to court to collect his back wages.
"If he goes and does something like that, little Jimmy will disappear and little Jimmy will never be found," Bobby Blevins recalls him saying.
Bobby Blevins didn't take Hammer seriously, but he remembers something else about that conversation.
"He said the people around here are getting ready to see the old Freddie P., the way it used to be."
■ Monte Mitchell can be reached in Wilkesboro at 336-667-5691 or at mmitchell@wsjournal.com.