Former sheriff returns to Prescott to help clean up city

Photo by Eric Nicholson. Julius “Doc” Delaughter, Prescott’s part-time code enforcer, knocks on the door of a home with an overgrown lawn.

Originally published in the Texarkana Gazette and on writeforarkansas.org on June 6, 2011.

PRESCOTT, Ark.—Julius “Doc” Delaughter knocks on the door of a white house on 1st Street, just outside of downtown.

Aging white paint flakes from the twin columns of the porch, partially obscured by an untrimmed shrub. The small lawn is overgrown, spilling onto the front walk, and shinhigh weeds sprout from gaps in the concrete.

The property is just a minor eyesore—one of many in Prescott—but seems like it may be destined to share the fate of its neighbor not far away on Main Street, the graying facade, collapsing roof and junglelike lawn of which have eaten away at a once-handsome home.


It’s Delaughter’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen. He was hired in late April as Prescott’s part-time code enforcer, and he spends much of his time politely encouraging property owners to tidy up their lawns.

Though he has been on the job for scarcely a month and works just 18 hours per week, he’s already made an impression.

“He’s done more in a few days than I thought he’d do in three or four months,” said Mayor Terry Oliver.

Delaughter has pursued his new job with purpose—not just to improve the town where he lives, but also to convince his employers that they were right in hiring him.

“I’m trying to make a splash,” he says.

The splash will have to wait at 247 1st Street. There is no answer, and Delaughter strides to the black Jeep idling in the driveway. He casts a quick glance at the address, then backs the Jeep into the road.

Worn down 
Delaughter might just be the most overqualified part-time code enforcer in the country.

His resume includes an eight-year stint as Nevada County sheriff, followed by time working undercover with the Arkansas State Police and as a deputy warden in the state prison system.

For much of the past decade, he has worked teaching internal affairs and investigation techniques to Iraqi and Afghan police and, more recently, as director of detainee operations for a private contractor in Afghanistan.

He returned to his hometown of Prescott for good in March 2010 after a 25-year absence, ostensibly to settle down.

“The short version is, my best friend told me ‘It’s time to come home,’” Delaughter says.

The friend, Duncan Culpepper, circuit judge for the 8th Judicial District-North, graduated high school with Delaughter, and the two had played football together for Prescott High School.

Culpepper was also deputy prosecutor for Nevada County while Delaughter was sheriff and, as Delaughter tells it, Culpepper was his lawyer for his first divorce and the judge for the next two. Delaughter says that he has now sworn off marriage.

The two stayed in touch after Delaughter moved away, talking weekly while he was overseas and reconnecting when he returned to visit.

By the time Delaughter ended his first tour in Iraq, Culpepper suggested he return permanently to Prescott.

“I could tell he was worn down then,” Culpepper says.

In 2007, Delaughter obliged and bought a house in Prescott, though his permanent return was interrupted by another three-year stint in Afghanistan.

“It was a good feeling to come home to my friends,” he says. “The old friendships never faded. I knew I had done the right thing.”

Retirement was another matter. During his previous attempt in 2002, after leaving the Arkansas Department of Corrections, he took to mowing neighbors’ yards to pass the time and, after less than two years, signed up to work in Iraq.

“I’m not one who can just sit around,” Delaughter says mildly.

Restiveness began to set in again in late 2010, but, at 62, he’s no longer interested in lengthy stints overseas, much less kicking down doors and running search warrants.

When he read in the newspaper that the city was looking for a part-time code enforcer, he sent in his resume, effectively ending the city’s search.

“We just got fortunate in the fact that he retired and moved back home and was looking for something to do,” said Mary Godwin, economic development director for Prescott and Nevada County.

Delaughter’s return coincided with a renewed effort by the city to clean up blighted properties and apply cleanup rules that had gone unenforced since they were passed in the 1980s.

In that time, Prescott suffered a decline in its fortunes, and the steady loss of business and population produced a glut of abandoned and uncared-for buildings. The malaise seemed to spread, and there was a gradual erosion in commitment to keeping the town presentable, Godwin said.

“It’s reached a point where (we thought), ‘We’re going to have to do something,’” she said.

For several months, city officials had been quietly working to begin the cleanup process. They identified more than two dozen properties that were dangerously run down and began working to secure permission from property owners to demolish the buildings, for which they have set aside $50,000.

To help focus the efforts, they decided they needed an employee dedicated to cleanup.

So far, Delaughter has focused on more manageable problems, mainly overgrown and cluttered lots, but will soon tackle more intractable cases, like vacant lots that have become weed-choked forests and a derelict house with 11 out-of-town owners (heirs to its former occupant), all of whom must give permission before it can be demolished.

For Delaughter, even such thorny issues are relatively mild.

“Needless to say, it’s a much slower pace than I’m used to,” Delaughter says with a half-wistful laugh. “And sure not as dangerous.”

Ants in a pile 
From the house on 1st Street, Delaughter heads to the Nevada County Courthouse, a featureless, one-story building a halfmile drive away. It’s where he once had his office as sheriff and has become a frequent haunt since he became code enforcer.

The house, according to tax assessor’s records, belongs to Michelle L. Jackson, in care of Jimmy Guyton. The clerk says that Guyton might be in the process of purchasing the home, though Jackson is the technical owner.

Delaughter heads across the hall to the tax collector’s office to see who’s paying the taxes.

“What you got today, Doc?” clerk Lee Jones asks as he approaches the window.

He gives her the address. It turns out that no one’s paying the taxes, which are delinquent, but Jones does find an address for Jackson in Everett, Wash.

Delaughter writes down the address, then heads out of the courthouse, makes a sharp right at the sidewalk and crosses the street to the Post Office. Inside, it’s cool and dim.

“You getting town cleaned up, Doc?” a red-headed postal clerk asks.

“Girl, I’m workin’ on it. It’s kind of like …” he says, grasping for an apt metaphor.

“Countin’ ants in a pile?” the clerk offers.

Doc nods. That’s about right, he says. He asks who lives in the house on 1st Street.

Another clerk, sorting mail in the back, calls out that about six people get mail at the address—including Jackson and Guyton. The information doesn’t clear things up for Delaughter.

“It’s usually not this hard,” he says as he walks back to his Jeep.

‘I was hooked’ 
Delaughter was scarcely free of the womb when people first started calling him “Doc.”

Shortly after his birth, his three great-uncles, all doctors, called to check on their new nephew. When they were told that he had been christened Julius, they were disappointed.

“Oh, God. Now go ahead and name him Doc, and maybe he’ll become a doctor,” they told his grandmother, per family legend.

The name stuck, even if the hoped-for medical career didn’t. He showed neither interest nor aptitude for the vocation. He considered it an accomplishment to escape from chemistry with a “D,” and, though his great-uncles promised to pay his way through medical school, Delaughter wasn’t interested.

He opted instead for the cattle business, which he entered when he was 14. He graduated from Southern Arkansas University (then Southern State) with a business degree in 1973, commuting to Magnolia each day so he could continue to care for his cattle.

His entry into law enforcement, which falls somewhere between whim and fate, came a few years later. Delaughter traces his interest in police work to when he was a teenager. He was being driven home from a football game in Arkadelphia by a friend who was in the ASP when word came over the radio of a burglary in progress. His friend pushed the accelerator to the floor and turned on the emergency lights, ignoring traffic signs and signals.

“I was hooked,” Delaughter said.

But a full decade would pass before Delaughter would jump into law enforcement in characteristically dramatic fashion.

In 1976 Delaughter, 26 years old and boasting no law enforcement experience save for the squad car ride as a teenager, put his name in the race for Nevada County sheriff.

He admits to having ambition but shrugs off any suggestion of hubris. He credits his eventual victory—by 272 votes in a runoff—to a jail fire that damaged the incumbent sheriff’s reputation and to shoe-leather politicking. He canvassed the county twice, shaking every hand that was available.

To compensate for his lack of experience, Delaughter took a slew of classes at the state police academy in Camden between his election in May and inauguration in January. He was re-elected three times, serving eight years as the top cop in Nevada County.

In 1985, after retiring as sheriff and being rejected from the FBI because of age, Delaughter joined the state police.

He spent most of his five years with the agency working, often undercover, on narcotics, securities fraud and organized-crime cases.

His home office is cluttered with mementos from the period. A few, like the framed 1976 campaign poster of a fresh-faced and eager-looking 26-year-old, are from his days as sheriff. Most, however are related to the ASP.

On one shelf is the fake driver’s license, in the name of John T. Dawkins, that Delaughter used for undercover work. Videos in his closet capture some of that work, including one in which a man offers to pay to have his wife murdered.

A thick scrapbook on his desk is filled with press clippings and letters of commendation from his more notable cases.

Several front page articles detail the ASP investigation into Dan Lasater, a major financial backer of then-Gov. Bill Clinton. Lasater was later convicted of cocaine distribution. Delaughter made drug buys from several Lasater associates, which he says helped solidify the case.

In another front-page clipping, which Delaughter makes special note of, he gives an interview to a Albuquerque, N.M., newspaper insisting that the investigation was shut down when it began stepping on politically well-connected toes.

A year after being reassigned to the highway patrol division, Delaughter left the ASP.

There is no visible reminder of his subsequent venture, a brief foray into the timber industry.

“I didn’t do so good,” he says. “I went broke.”

In need of employment, he joined the ADC as the assistant warden of the Delta Regional Unit, where he spent three years before retiring and beginning his work overseas.

Keeping an eye out 
Most of the cases Delaughter has encountered so far as code enforcer have been straightforward. The former sheriff knocks on a door, speaks with a property owner face-to-face, and persuades them to tidy up.

Driving through town, he points out several several examples of his work—homes and buildings with fresh-mown lawns. At the long-shuttered Chevrolet dealership, a young man makes passes with his riding mower through an adjacent patch of thigh-high weeds.

“Everyone’s been very cooperative,” Delaughter says.

Occasionally, though, the owner can’t be found, so Delaughter has the city send a letter to the owner of record, informing them that their property is not in compliance with city code.

At City Hall, he tells the secretary to send two letters: one to the house on 1st Street address, another to Everett, Wash.

Ann Jordan, busy at a nearby desk stuffing envelopes, overhears the conversation.

Jackson was a major witness in a criminal case, she tells Delaughter, barely looking up.

“She moved out of state,” she says. “We’ve been trying to find her for a year and a half to get her to go to circuit court.”

Jordan was, until recently, the assistant chief of the Prescott Police Department, hence her knowledge of outstanding warrants, Delaughter explains.

It’s a new lead, and Delaughter drives the block to the Prescott Police Department, where he maintains a bare-bones office in the cavernous and mostly vacant back room painted incongruously in baby blue.

He knocks on the door of Chief Bryan Russell—whom Delaughter describes as “a principle person,” in helping him get adjusted—and asks about Jackson.

Russell confirms that she moved to Washington, but Guyton’s the one living in the house on 1st Street. He works over at Mama Max’s, a soul food diner, Russell says.

Delaughter gets back in the Jeep and drives to the diner. It’s just after lunchtime, about 2 p.m., and the restaurant is closed and dark. He knocks on the door of the house appended to the back of the restaurant, but Mama Max isn’t home.

As he’s driving away, he spots a couple of men tinkering idly in an adjacent lot and stops to ask after Guyton.


Yes, they know him, but he doesn’t work for Mama Max anymore. They say that yes, he resides at the house on 1st Street and drives a small, brown car.

Delaughter thanks them and drives away.

“I’ll just have to keep an eye out for him,” he says.

Home
Delaughter’s home is a spacious ranch-style affair in a well-kept neighborhood a five-minute walk from downtown. His well-shaded green lawn is neat, and a hydrangea blooms in a side flowerbed. 

His return to Prescott and public service has prompted some speculation that he is angling for another shot at his former office, which has been plagued by scandal and high turnover in recent years.

The speculators should save their breath, he says.

“Everyone’s got me running for sheriff,” he says. “Doc is not running for sheriff. Eight years of it is long enough.”

Still, he seems content to be back in Prescott and says that age has erased any remnants of wanderlust. He’s not sure how long he’ll stick to the code enforcement job, but for now, at least, he’s happy to have something to do and an opportunity to help Prescott.

“It is home, even though it’s deteriorating,” he says. “A lot of memories.”