Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 5, 1994 TAG: 9404050036
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KATHY LOAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PULASKI LENGTH: Long
Both Christiansburg men were convicted of murder as teen-agers in Montgomery County.
Late last fall, police say, the two parolees got together and savagely beat Bobby McDaniel of Pulaski County at his Hazel Hollow Road home.
Shanks, 30, admits being the one who used a claw hammer to beat McDaniel. But he said during an interview Monday that the attack was the culmination of his frustration at being ill-prepared to re-enter society after spending almost half his life in prison.
"I felt like the best place for me was behind bars," said Shanks, who was indicted Monday by a Pulaski County grand jury on a charge of aggravated malicious wounding.
Hampton, 35, who is being held in the Guilford County, N.C., jail, was indicted last month on a malicious wounding charge in the same beating. That indictment, and the subsequent search for him, led to a two-week manhunt through the New River Valley and parts of West Virginia and North Carolina.
Hampton now faces felony charges accusing him of raping a woman in Beckley, W.Va., and stealing her car; beating an elderly Montgomery County garage owner over the head and taking about $500 from him; then forcing two Maryland women to give up their car at an Ironto rest stop.
Hampton was caught in Greensboro, N.C., on March 7 after allegedly stealing another car. North Carolina authorities also charged Hampton with robbery, kidnapping and several traffic offenses after a woman was forced into her car by a man at a shopping center.
Shanks, who also was indicted Friday in Montgomery County on a charge of robbing a Blacksburg convenience store, confessed to Pulaski County authorities last month that he was the one who attacked McDaniel.
The grand jury also returned four other indictments against each of the two men. Hampton and Shanks are accused of conspiring to rob and murder McDaniel, robbery, and entering a residence in the nighttime with intent to rob.
Shanks said he turned into a bitter man as he unsuccessfully sought parole from his 41-year sentence for the 1979 murder of Edward Charles Disney. Shanks was 15 at the time; Disney was 17.
While in prison, he earned a high school equivalency diploma, received a certificate in cabinet-making and carpentry, completed two college courses and served as a Literacy Volunteers of America tutor.
But his requests for early parole and to be placed on a road gang were denied. Shanks made parole in 1993, his fifth try, after serving about 13 years of the sentence. "At the end, I didn't give a damn. . . . When I got out, I felt like a rat in society. I had no preparation for it. . . .
"When I walked out of that prison door, I was just saddled with this impending doom. I knew I was going back," Shanks said.
Shanks amassed a handful of traffic charges from April to November, ranging from running a red light to driving under the influence and driving on a suspended license.
"Anybody that says prison rehabilitates is full of it," Shanks said. "You're thrown into a hate-filled environment. There's so much violence."
The experience is "either going to break you, or you're going to be a hell of a lot meaner," Shanks said.
Without any preparation for re-entering society, Shanks said, he left with a lot of bitterness. "I got out of prison, but I couldn't get the prison out of me," he said.
It was difficult to go home to parents who had adopted him while he was incarcerated as a teen-ager.
"I had a family that stood by me but I needed more than that," Shanks said. "I had a family that loved me. They were there for me through thick and thin."
But, Shanks said, the family was Christian, and "I didn't really feel a part of that." It was odd to sit down at the the dinner table to a prayer when he came out of a world where he practically had to go to the prison chow line armed with homemade weapons for protection, Shanks said.
"It was kind of like I was a stranger."
Hampton lived only a few blocks away in Christiansburg, and the two soon began getting together to ride around, Shanks said. Hampton had been paroled in April 1992 after serving time for the 1975 murder of a 95-year-old woman and for unrelated forgery charges. Hampton was 16 at the time of the murder.
"When I got out of prison, I gave him a call because, at that time, he was the only one I knew in society," Shanks said.
Pulaski County Sheriff Ralph Dobbins said Shanks became a suspect in the McDaniel beating as authorities looked for Hampton last month after the malicious wounding charge was returned against him.
"We learned through acquaintances of [Hampton's] that he had palled around with this Gary O'Neal Shanks," Dobbins said.
Dobbins' department found out that Shanks had been in the Montgomery County Jail since Nov. 12 - four days after McDaniel was assaulted - for parole violation.
Shanks originally told Pulaski County investigators that he was at McDaniel's house and witnessed the assault but did not participate.
A few days later, Dobbins said, Shanks told an investigator he was the attacker and that McDaniel was robbed of several hundred dollars.
The robbery admission finally gave authorities what they had been looking for in an four-month investigation of the brutal attack: a motive.
"Mr. McDaniel himself couldn't tell us he had X number of dollars in his pocket. Now we know why it happened and how it happened," Dobbins said.
Shanks said he didn't know McDaniel, and he didn't go to the man's home consciously planning to hurt him.
"I kind of had a lot of anger, and I guess I took it out on Mr. McDaniel. It could have very well been someone else," Shanks said.
But it was McDaniel who "caught the full force of 14 years' worth of incarceration and all that anger I had."
Shanks said he recently confessed to the Blacksburg robbery charge about two months after denying involvement, when a Blacksburg detective questioned him at the jail in January.
And, he said, he called this newspaper after confessing, because he hadn't been charged. He thought if the paper wrote about his confession, the police would move more quickly to charge him.
by CNB