A Father's Mission

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

A father's anguish ...

Paul Crotts: Gut wrenchin. Tears your heart out. Just it's, it's just incomparable. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

Anger at the people he says stole his son's youth. Anger at himself for helping them

Paul Crotts: I slapped myself in the face with my fist. I was so bitter at myself for what I had done.

And so, his relentless quest: What really happened in this lonely farmhouse nearly twenty years ago....

David Ross: I've never been around anybody like it. I mean he's really. He's obsessed with it.

Perhaps because of the secret Paul Crotts has harbored himself all these years- has kept even from his son. Especially from his son.

Keith Morrison: Are you worried about how he'll look at you if you tell him?

Paul Crotts: Yeah.

Keith Morrison: Do you need to tell him?

Paul Crotts: Yeah.

Tucked into the corner of this town square in Graham, N.C., is a mom and pop furniture store. It's been here for sixty years - something to depend on in an uncertain world of shuttered textile plants and dilapidated farms. A place to buy a discount couch and chat about the good old days.

Paul Crotts: They'll say, Paul, I remember this little baby that used to be in the bassinet in this part of the store. And they say, who was that baby? It was me.

About everybody in town knows Paul Crotts and not just from watching him grow up in the store his daddy founded.

Paul was a high school football hero. Volunteer fireman. Champion bodybuilder. Paul tried to make his father proud. Which is why the experience with his own son was so hard for him to bear.

Keith Morrison: At the time it was like, where did that kid come from?

Paul Crotts: Oh, yeah.

Keith Morrison: He's not like me at all.

Paul Crotts: Yeah.

Did Paul ever really know his son?

Paul Crotts: The daddy is always the black sheep of the divorce.

Paul's marriage collapsed in the late 1970s. His 10-year-old son, Mark took it hard.

Linda: It was a very difficult time. Cried a lot. Couldn't understand why Daddy wasn't coming home.

Linda is Mark's mother.  She set up house a few miles, but a world away from the furniture store.  Wrong side of the tracks, maybe, but Mark thrived.  He loved the country, loved tracking deer, loved cat-fishing in the ponds. It was freedom to him.

But he dreaded weekend visits with his workaholic dad.

Linda: He was too rough with him when he disciplined him. It scared Mark. Mark, I think, was really afraid of his father.

By the time Mark was in his teens, the visits to town stopped. Mark gravitated to friends and  - just like his dad before him - became a high school football star.

But something happened in the 11th grade.  And Paul heard about it.  Mark was drinking, smoking marijuana...acting out. Mark's mother did what she could.  She put him in rehab, helped the 19-year-old set up a taxidermy business in an old barn she rented off the highway. He was good at that.

But he couldn't stop partying. At her wit's end, Mark's mother threw him out of the house/

Paul Crotts: He was penniless, living out of his car.

That's when Paul stepped back into his son's life. Became his partner in that little business...told his son to shape up...thought it was working, until he started getting those phone calls.

Paul Crotts: You need to be aware that Mark is a laughing joke out here, and people are saying that you can go steal anything from him.

Keith Morrison: Was the business making any money?

Paul Crotts: The beginning, yes. The end, no.

To Paul, it looked like Mark was spending the profits, raising Cain at the barn with his drinking buddies. People like his high school sweetheart, Kristen Vincent.

Kristen Vincent: Music really really loud. Really hard heavy metal. And there was alcohol everywhere. I remember several mentions from different people that they had taken acid.

It was behavior Mark's dad just didn't understand. He started dropping by after hours, checking on the inventory with a flashlight in the dark. Then in May 1989, just three months after he had helped his son start over, Paul says he found something unforgivable.

Paul Crotts: As I was exiting the building, I saw the marijuana in a pot. It was about three stalks.  And-- that just infuriated me.  I said, here he is, growing marijuana.  Here he is, an establishment, business, he's growing marijuana.

They say you never really know the moment when you cast the dye in your life.  Not till later.

That was Paul's moment. His choice.

Paul Crotts: I can still see the phone booth I made it from.

He called the sheriff's department and turned in his son. Tough love, he thought.

Paul Crotts: I thought maybe I could use scare tactic.

Keith Morrison: Scare him straight, as they say?

Paul Crotts: (nods)

Keith Morrison: Did you think then you'd done the right thing?

Paul Crotts: Yes, I did. 

Mark pleaded guilty to misdemeanor marijuana possession and was put on probation. He never knew it was his father who had turned him in.

Video   Dad recalls details of court battle Mark Crott's father, Paul Crotts, talks about the trials and tribulations of being at the center of a controversial homicide trial. Dateline NBC

And Paul wasn't done - he shut down the taxidermy business and brought his 21-year old son back to town, where he could keep an eye on him, at the furniture store. He didn't like what he saw.

Paul Crotts: I found a bag of marijuana under the seat of his truck. I confronted him. We went out back of the store, and we got in a fistfight.

Paul says he beat Mark more than once - his son pleading with him to stop. And Mark, whenever he could, sneaked away with his friends to the old taxidermy shop.

Keith Morrison: What was this thing that worried you the most about Mark in those days?

Paul Crotts: Findin' him dead or drivin' and hurtin' somebody else, an innocent.

Of course, Paul could not have known - who could? - that two innocents were about to die, steps from Mark's rented barn.  That party barn.

Paul would be faced with the ultimate choice - to cast out the son he no longer recognized, the son he could not change, or stand behind him when so few others would.

Paul Crotts: I always said if you play with fire long enough you gonna get burnt. And Mark was playing with the red hot coals.

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