Tuesday, December 21, 1999
Blues singer tracked down
on 30-year-old murder charge
He took a new name, started a new life. But a Cincinnati man is finally in jail awaiting trial
BY DAN HORN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Living in Mississippi under the name Willie 'Dee' Dixon, accused killer Michael Copening made a blues disc called 'I Know What the Blues Is.'
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JACKSON, Miss. — The guy standing in the doorway says he knows the blues, but Warren Burrell isn't so sure.
He says his name is Willie “Dee” Dixon and he looks like every other wannabe bluesman who haunts Jackson's bars and barbecue joints. His thrift-store shirt hangs loose over his shoulders and his eyes are red from too much booze or too little sleep.
Mr. Burrell runs a recording studio out of his garage. He looks Willie over and shakes his head. “Sing for me.”
Willie steps into the garage and clears his throat.
“Ain't got a nickel, ain't got a dime. Don't have nobody, I can call mine.”
The voice is raw, unpolished. But to Mr. Burrell, it's pure desperation. The voice of a man who is carrying a burden.
Six years would pass and his friend would go to jail before Mr. Burrell discovered just how heavy that burden was.
Michael Copening
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He would learn that Willie's real name was Michael Copening, a fugitive wanted in Cincinnati for a murder in 1970. He would learn that the victim, Stanford Favors, died in the back seat of a car from four bullet wounds.
Mostly, though, Mr. Burrell would learn that a man accused of doing such a thing will feel the weight of it every day.
He will feel it when he sings, when he works, even when he falls in love.
This is what Mr. Burrell learned from the man he knew as Willie Dixon.
Willie 'Dee' Dixon's poster hangs on the wall of Warren Burrell's recording studio.
(Glenn Hartong photos)
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“I thought I knew him, I really did,” says Mr. Burrell, who befriended Mr. Copening and performed with him at blues clubs. “I guess I figured he had something in his past, but I didn't have the slightest idea it was this.”
Authorities are pretty sure no one else did, either. They say Mr. Copening, now 53, apparently kept quiet and out of trouble as he traveled first to West Virginia, then down the East Coast to Florida, and finally into the Deep South.
About 15 years ago, he took a job in Jackson and decided to stay. It was a good place to hide.
Perched at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta, Jackson is a small city surrounded by small towns.
A man could fish the Pearl River for catfish or plant a garden behind an abandoned trailer, and no one would question him. He might find shelter in the city itself, hiding in one of the many boarded-up buildings along Medgar Evers Drive.
Over the years, Mr. Copening did all of those things.
He built a life in another place, with another name. It was built on a lie he would carry with him every day.
He sang the blues
Looking back, Mr. Burrell says, he can feel the weight in Mr. Copening's voice.
It's not just in the songs he sang, those traditional blues tales of lost love, missed opportunity and unanswered prayers. It's in the way he sang them.
Dixon sang at the Queen of Hearts in Jackson, Miss.
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His voice was untrained, but there was something genuine in it. Something that drew people to his performances at Jackson's blues bars and after-hours clubs.
“He didn't play, but he sure could sing,” recalls James Bennett, a Jackson record shop owner who heard him perform. “The guy was great, baby. He could really blow.”
The blues were a constant in Mr. Copening's life. Muddy Waters. Howlin' Wolf. Otis Redding. He sang almost everything.
Even his alias, Willie Dixon, is an apparent nod to the great blues' songwriter of the same name.
By 1993, some fans began urging him to cut a record with one of the many small-time producers around Jackson.
So he started making the rounds to the basements and garages and cheap storefronts that doubled as recording studios. Eventually, he found Warren Burrell.
After his audition in Mr. Burrell's garage, the producer offered him a deal. He'd work with him, maybe cut a few hundred compact discs and tapes, but only if Willie showed up sober for the sessions.
At the time, Mr. Burrell recalls, Willie's life was a mess. He was living under bridges and in vacant buildings, drinking too much.
The house where he lived in Jackson, Miss., was home to seven stray dogs he took in.
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“He didn't have an address,” says Mr. Burrell, a retired civil engineer who now promotes blues acts from a studio no larger than a mini-van. “He was on the street when I met him.”
But the record project seemed to energize him. Mr. Burrell recalls staying up night after night in the studio, knocking out guitar riffs to accompany Willie's lyrics.
The pair wrote songs whenever and wherever inspiration struck, scratching out lyrics and chords on paper plates, napkins and anything else that happened to be around.
The result was a disc called I Know What the Blues Is. The songs, with titles like “I Am So Sorry” and “Going Back to Mississippi,” are stories of failed romances and life on the road.
“When he said he knew what the blues is, he really knew,” Mr. Burrell says. “You could tell he was carryin' something around with him.”
But Mr. Burrell never pushed for details. Instead, he put Willie's picture on the album cover and printed up a few hundred posters. Soon, Willie's face was stapled to telephone poles and bus stops all over town.
Willie didn't seem to share his producer's enthusiasm for promotion. Mr. Burrell couldn't figure it out. Here's a guy who sings for four hours a show, goes until his shirt is soaked with sweat, but he won't spend a minute promoting the act.
He finally talked him into doing a show on public access TV. But on the big day, Willie played the whole gig with a black hat pulled down over his eyes.
“Every time he started to get real popular, he'd start to back off,” Mr. Burrell says. “It didn't make sense.”
Emma Magnum (left), with whom Copening lived, and her friend Vertie Adams.
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The producer repeatedly tried to convince the singer to tour blues clubs with him in Europe, but Willie never got a passport. Never could find five minutes to sign his name and Social Security number to an application.
He did find time to drink, however. Before important gigs, the ones that were heavily advertised, he'd stay out all night carousing. Then he'd skip the show.
“Man, what's the matter with you?” Mr. Burrell would shout at him.
When he drank, Mr. Burrell says, Willie's personality turned dark. “He'd get irritable,” he says. “He'd want to go off by himself, like he had something on his mind.”
Finally, tired of the self-sabotage, Mr. Burrell urged his friend to check into a rehab center. It was time, he said, to start dealing with whatever was wearing him down.
Willie signed up for the program that week.
Building a life
After a month away from the shows and the publicity, some of the weight seemed to be lifted. Mr. Burrell says Willie cut back on his drinking and seemed to be in a better mood.
In 1997, he went to work at a thrift shop in Jackson. His job was to help customers sift through the racks of old clothes.
One of those customers was Emma Mangum. She worked at a Sack & Save grocery and lived alone on a dead-end road in a neighborhood called Sweet Home Church. Her gray hair was pulled back neatly and she was wearing a nice Sunday dress.
Right away, she caught Willie's eye. “Can we exchange phone numbers?” he asked her.
“No,” she told him. “I don't even know you.”
But before she left, she waved him over. “Give me your number,” she said.
They moved in together a year ago, sharing a one-story house with a sloping roof and faded green paint. She says he raked the leaves, tended the garden, even cooked some meals.
“He was just the perfect thing around the house,” she says. “He's a very sweet man.'
He got a job at the “D” lux Car Detail Shop and brought home a few hundred dollars a week. Emma drove him to work every morning because Willie didn't have a driver's license. He kept saying he'd get one, but he never did.
The car shop's manager, Troy Vincent Jr., says Willie was one of his best employees. “This is a rough job,” he says. “You got to really want to work to stick to this.”
He was friendly enough, but didn't talk much to customers. Sometimes a deputy sheriff, Billy Dodd, would stop by to visit with Mr. Vincent and his dad. Willie usually kept his distance, finding something to do on the other side of the shop.
“That's not so unusual, though,” Deputy Dodd recalls. “Lot of folks are that way around the police.”
Mr. Vincent, who's also a youth minister, says he spent almost every lunch break talking to Willie. The conversations jumped from the Bible to race relations to the weather.
One thing they didn't talk about was Willie's family or background. Emma says the same was true at home. “He didn't talk about his past,” she says.
Her two grandsons, ages 10 and 9, visited often and spent most of their time following Willie around. They'd laugh when he sang like Barry White and they'd go along with him for hikes in the woods.
They'd come back an hour later with dirty hands and pockets stuffed with colorful rocks or turtle shells. “They'd just have so much fun,” Emma says.
At the end of the day, Willie would grill hot dogs for the kids. He'd help with their homework in the evening, checking their math problems or writing assignments.
At night, the house was quiet except for an occasional yelp from the dogs outside. There were seven of them, strays that never left after Willie started feeding them.
“He loved those dogs,” Emma says. “He was just that way.”
Over time, Willie took to calling Emma his wife. They never got a license, though. Never made it official. Something seemed to keep Willie from taking that step.
Emma never asked what it was. She didn't need a piece of paper from the courthouse to make her feel that Willie was her husband. “I didn't see no difference,” she says. “We was together.”
Going back to Ohio
Emma woke to the sound of barking dogs the morning of Nov. 18. The mutts were going crazy out front, and she could hear voices telling them to be quiet.
“What's going on, Willie?”
Then a knock at the door and a command. “Michael Copening, this is the FBI! Come outside right now!”
Emma heard the door open and slam shut. She rushed outside to find Willie on his knees, surrounded by cops with their guns drawn. She kept asking, what's going on? Why is this happening?
The cops, a half dozen of them, put Willie in handcuffs and led him to a car. They said something about a murder. Something about Ohio.
None of it made any sense.
Emma went to the Rankin County Sheriff's Office looking for Willie, but they wouldn't let her see him. He was inside answering questions.
She waited there for hours while Willie talked to Billy Dodd and two FBI agents.
Deputy Dodd says the agents wouldn't say how they found Willie, but they knew a lot about him. They knew his real name was Michael Copening and they knew he graduated from Lincoln Heights High School in Ohio.
They knew he had been pretending to be someone else for almost 30 years.
“They didn't just pull your name out of a phone book, Willie,” Deputy Dodd told him. “If they didn't know who you are, we wouldn't be sitting here.”
That's when Willie started talking about the night of Feb. 3, 1970. He later signed a statement claiming Mr. Favors threatened him and drew a gun that night. It was self-defense, he said.
“I jumped out of the car and ran,” wrote Mr. Copening, who hasn't spoken about the incident since.
“He started runnin' and he's been going ever since,” Deputy Dodd says.
Whatever really happened that night, Deputy Dodd says, the man he knew as Willie almost seemed relieved when he finally started talking about it.
“He was looking over his shoulder for a long time,” he
says.
Emma went to see Willie in jail a few days later, on a Sunday. She wanted to tell him before he was sent back to Ohio that she missed him and she hoped he'd be coming home soon.
He slumped in his seat and looked at the floor. He told her he didn't know when he'd be back.
He would be heading to Cincinnati soon, where prosecutors had a witness waiting to testify against him. A murder conviction could mean 20 years to life in prison.
The burden, though, was finally lifting. “I'm glad it's all behind me,” he told her.
Emma started crying. “Oh, Willie,” she said, again and again.
He looked at her across the table, fidgeting with his handcuffs.
“I'm Michael now,” he said. “I'm Michael.”
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