A Ride into Darkness
On a cold December night in 1949, Bill Allman was killed. This series follows the ripple effects — from courtroom to clemency, from grief to guitars — and the music that rose from it all... music that outlasted everyone who played it. Read the full series introduction here.
“Y’all mind giving me a ride to C&Cs?”
Michael Robert “Buddy” Green was talking to Bill Allman and Robert Buchanan, two nice guys, both Army Second Lieutenants.
Green had befriended the officers as they were playing table shuffleboard at The Oriental Gardens, a Norfolk, Virginia, beer tavern popular with servicemen from nearby Fort Story and the sprawling Naval base.
The Oriental had beer, music, and shuffleboard. It was a place where the weight of war’s memory could be shaken off with a drink and a laugh — and where names and stories didn’t always need to be shared.
If the three men had shared their war stories, or even their names, as they hung out, Buddy would have learned that Bill stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day with his brother, Sam, and both brothers survived the intense fighting to eventually make it home to Nashville, Tennessee, after the war, and both brothers were still actively serving in the Army.
Second Lieutenant Willis T. “Bill” Allman, U.S. Army, stationed at Fort Story in Norfolk, Virginia.
Bill was a D-Day veteran, husband to Geraldine “Jerry” Allman, and father to two young sons, Duane and Gregg Allman. Bill’s death on December 26, 1949, left Jerry to raise the boys alone — a loss that would shape them and ultimately give rise to the Allman Brothers Band, pioneers of a new genre of Southern Rock that caught fire in Macon, Georgia, and spread around the world.
(Family photo)
Bill and his best friend Buchanan, called Bucky, would have learned that Buddy was a sapper — a combat engineer who defused mines by hand in Italy — and that Buddy’s commanding officer had once praised his fearlessness under fire. Buddy might have told them about the Italian woman he married overseas and their toddler who was waiting for him at home that night.
But they didn’t talk about the war, which was one thing Bill liked about hanging out with Bucky, who was recently back from his tour of duty in Europe. They didn’t need to relive what they had survived.
It was the day after Christmas.
Bill, 31, and Bucky, 28, had gone to The Oriental Gardens for a beer and a bite after working a shift and they had no particular plans beyond relaxing. But they did count their money early on, to know what they could afford in the way of drinks and a meal. Bucky had $2.45 and Allman had $2.40 in their wallets.
Bill’s wife Geraldine — Jerry — had taken their two young boys to visit her family in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, for Christmas. Bill had stayed behind, stationed with the 558th Transportation Corps at Fort Story, a quiet base tucked into the far northeast edge of Virginia Beach.
The Allmans’ duplex at the fort was mere feet from the sand dunes and the sea — a stretch of shoreline where the Atlantic waters merged into Chesapeake Bay. A tranquil place. But also a place rich with ghosts.
Centuries earlier, the first English colonists made landfall on this very beach before pushing inland to found Jamestown. During the Revolutionary War, the French fleet blockaded these waters to trap Cornwallis at Yorktown, sealing the fate of British rule. In 1791, the young American government built its first official lighthouse here at Cape Henry, casting a new light onto old waters.
The South had been defeated in the Civil War nearly a century earlier, but it hadn’t forgotten. Norfolk clung to segregation, its beaches divided by color, its schools and diners still marked by law and custom. The city was growing — spurred by military spending, shipbuilding, and the return of veterans — but the emotional wounds of war, poverty, and inequality remained close to the surface.
By 1949, Fort Story was a blend of past and present — colonial battleground and Cold War outpost. It was also, for men like Bill and Bucky, a refuge after the chaos of Europe. A place to start over. Or try to.
Moment of No Return
When Buddy, a 26-year-old unemployed plumber’s helper, befriended the officers and asked for a lift to C & C Bar and Grill — and later to Jimmie’s Drive-In Grill — they said yes. Why wouldn’t they? It was nearly 9pm and their evening was winding down; they could drop Buddy off at Jimmie’s on the way home to Fort Story.
Bill and Bucky couldn’t have known Buddy had a German revolver hidden on him, or that he’d eventually lead them to East Ocean View near the bay. They didn’t know this whole evening had been a setup — that Buddy had picked them out in the tavern as marks. Two friendly officers, generous by nature. Easy targets.
In 1949, East Ocean View was still semi-rural. Farm fields and dirt roads stretched out beyond the glow of city lights. Duke Brickhouse, a Norfolk native who would later become a neighbor of Buddy’s, described the area in those years as “like the Wild West.”
The recently decommissioned military airport nearby had just reopened as Norfolk Municipal Airport, and Piedmont Airlines was preparing its first commercial flights. But the area was still sparsely populated — dark at night, quiet. A good place to vanish.
The men left C & C’s and headed to Jimmie’s.
Galadrielle Allman writes in Please Be With Me: A Song for my father Duane Allman, that Buddy grew more forceful once he got into the back seat — after refusing the front passenger seat offered by Bucky — and then:
“Just as the pink glow of Jimmie’s neon sign came into view, the man leaned between Bucky and Bill and asked a little loudly to be taken home, to a little lane off Sewell’s Point Road, a name he pronounced as ‘souls point’. As Bucky made the final turn, the man pushed a gun into his ribs and said, ‘This is a holdup.’”
They were now deeper into the dark.
“Stop here,” Buddy said, directing Bucky to pull near a dirt lane.
News articles would say they had stopped somewhere near Little Creek Road and Lambert’s Farm.
That would have put Bill about six miles from his Fort Story home. Maybe he wished he was there, listening to the waves, waiting for Jerry’s return with the boys that evening to hear about their Christmas.
“Get out,” Buddy ordered and the two officers complied.
Then, as headlights appeared from an approaching car, Buddy ordered them back in, telling Bucky to back down the dirt lane. By the glow of the license plate light, Buddy went through their wallets and pulled out the dollar bills.
Bill and Bucky’s combined $4.85 was the equivalent of $53.39 in 2025.
In 1949, the basic monthly pay for a private averaged from $75 to $150, depending on their pay grade and time in the service. That equivalent of $53.39 was a decent haul for a man with no job and a family to feed.
Again, waving the gun, Buddy told them to take off their shoes and walk toward a line of nearby trees by a freshly plowed field. Once there, he told Bill and Bucky to separate and lie facedown in the dirt, muddy from a recent rain.
Bucky, terrified, said, “Don’t shoot us, Buddy.”
Bucky had no way of knowing this 5-foot, 8-inch man with dark hair, who grew up in East Ocean View — and who had deep family roots in Norfolk — was nicknamed “Buddy.”
“It’s too bad you know my name,” Buddy replied, according to early press reports quoting Bucky. “Now I have to kill you.”
In Galadrielle’s version in her book, taken directly from Bucky’s police report, Buddy had said: “You know my name, so here is where you get yours.”
In a December 28, 1949, article by The Record-Argus, the reporter wrote, “The officers then jumped the assailant, according to the story told by Buchanan. When an opening presented itself, Buchanan broke away and ran to a nearby house to summon help.”
Galadrielle writes in her book that, according to Bucky's police statement, it was only Bill Allman who jumped Green in self-defense after he'd pulled a gun on them. Bucky took off running to the farmhouse for help. Hearing a gunshot behind him, Bucky looked back to see Bill still running across the muddy field.
“Robert!” Bill called to him, yelling his formal name in panic.
“Run, Bill!” Bucky yelled. Then another shot sounded.
After banging on the farmhouse door, Bucky was devastated to learn they had no phone or car; no way to get outside help. And they weren’t inclined to help, anyway.
Realizing he was Bill’s only hope, Bucky ran back to the scene, calling out for Bill, yelling his name over and over into the dark.
Bucky heard his car door open, slam, and open again.
When he saw Buddy’s silhouette moving toward him he went silent, stepping back into trees, hiding. Buddy walked with the gun still in his hand, looking for Bucky. Then he went back to Bucky’s car, got in, and drove away, taking the car, the money, and Allman’s life; leaving Bucky in shock.
When the police arrived, they found Bill’s body not in the trees where the wrestling had taken place, but far into that plowed field. Bill had been shot in the back. He’d run a good distance. Where he fell says something about Bill Allman — his bravery, his stamina, the sheer force of his will to live.
And his death says something chilling about Buddy — who waited silently in the brush, prepared to kill a second man.
Galadrielle writes that Bucky went to a second home and called the police, but he didn’t remember any of it, just recollected being in a kitchen and checking his watch: 9:30pm.
It had all happened so fast.
Bill wasn’t far from his Fort Story duplex when he died in that field, and Buddy was just three miles from the home he shared with Marie and their daughter, next door to his parents’ home.
Buddy was calculating in robbing Bill and Bucky. A cold-blooded murder.
It didn’t have to end in death, though.
Buddy Green had already gotten what he came for: the wallet with a few dollars, the coins dropped into the dirt. He could’ve left Bill and Bucky shoeless and alive, dust rising around them as he drove Bucky’s car into the dark. But he didn’t. Instead, Buddy shot Bill in the back—shot him while he was defenseless, running away—and then turned his attention to hunting down Bucky, as if erasing the witnesses might erase the crime.
The Choice
Bill hadn’t seen it coming. The bullet caught him as he was moving away—retreating—already defeated. And that’s when Buddy made his real choice. That moment—after the deadly shot was fired—is where the clearest picture of Buddy’s character comes into focus. Because he had a choice then. He could’ve been horrified. He could’ve realized he’d just altered three lives forever, his own included.
He could’ve panicked, fumbled for a way to save face or show remorse. Hell, he could’ve tried to help Bill to the car and drive him to the nearest hospital.
He could’ve looked at what he’d done and snapped out of it—gone from criminal to human again.
But he didn’t.
Instead, Buddy stood there and scanned the trees; not frantic, not clumsy, but deliberate. Searching. Trying to find the second witness. Trying to finish the job.
Buddy moved through the shadows like a hunter, not a man unraveling. The way he turned toward the brush. The pause as he listened for Bucky’s breath. The soft crunch of needles under his boots as he crossed the shallow ditch, pistol still warm in his hand.
His breath steady. His grip sure. Buddy was not out of control; he was in it.
That night in the dark, Buddy wasn’t acting out of desperation. He had his faculties about him and he made choices that made all the difference. Buddy was sane enough to calculate his next move in the middle of someone else’s final moments.
The killing wasn’t impulsive. It was the logical next step in a plan that didn’t tolerate risk. Two men in the woods had become two liabilities, and Buddy moved like he had in the war—silently, quickly, without remorse.
The Witness
Bucky was a war veteran too. He’d seen terrible things in Europe. And now here he was again, back home, watching another man die at close range. Not in a war zone but his own town, a place supposedly ruled by law and order.
No training prepares for that.
That’s probably why Bucky quoted Buddy twice with two different statements: The quote, “You know my name, so here is where you get yours,” is different—more sinister—than the other version printed in the newspapers: “Too bad you know my name. Now I have to kill you.”
The second version sounds like logic, like necessity.
The words Bucky remembers don’t sound like Buddy cleaning up loose ends. They sound like a man flipping the switch—turning kindness into guilt, strangers into enemies. “Here is where you get yours” assumes they had something coming. That they deserved this. But they didn’t.
Bill and Bucky had done nothing but give a man a ride. So what exactly were they getting? Digging deeper, we can see how Bucky’s two versions of what Buddy said reveal something about him as victim and about Buddy, the man holding the gun.
Bucky’s statements weren’t courtroom transcriptions. They were the approximations of a man in shock. Bucky had just watched his friend get gunned down. He had fled barefoot through the trees. He ended up at two strange farmhouses, one whose owner refused to help and the other where Bucky was able to call the police—yet he had no memory of visiting the second farmhouse. That’s how trauma works. It rewires the brain. Pulls a curtain over unbearable moments. Gives you fragments instead of facts.
Bucky’s brain protected him the only way it could: by dissociating.
Bucky survived that night. And then he did his civic and moral duty—testified, cooperated. But surviving means more than staying alive. It means carrying the weight of what you saw, and what you couldn't stop.
Long Drive Home
While Buddy stalked the woods, silent and unbothered, Jerry Allman was driving north toward Fort Story and home, her sons asleep in the backseat. The drive back to Norfolk was long and Bill was due home from work any time. She was looking forward to baths, pajamas, and maybe a few minutes of quiet before her husband walked through the door.
The day had already been too loud, and she heard echoes as she drove.
Just hours earlier, in the safety of their grandmother’s home, Gregg—barely two years old—had gotten his hands on a handgun hidden under his Grandmother’s bed. While the family was talking in high holiday spirits, Gregg toddled into the living room, holding what he thought was another toy, and squeezed its trigger.
The shot cracked the air and the bullet hit the edge of the brick fireplace. The recoil knocked Gregg to the floor. He wasn’t seriously hurt, just stunned, and the family flew into action, shocked, reeling with disbelief at how close tragedy had visited them in such close quarters.
The sound of the gun fire haunted Jerry all the way home — that sudden explosion, that taste of what could’ve gone wrong. What almost did. The mind can barely wrap around such a close call.
She didn’t know that while she was listening to echoes of one gunshot, another was already ringing out up ahead, just a few miles from her home. Real damage done this time. Permanent.
Jerry didn’t know Bill would never walk through their front door again. That the man she loved, the father of her children, had helped a stranger—and was now lying face down in the dirt, blood soaking into a Southern field.
She didn’t know that Gregg’s accidental firing of the pistol wasn’t the sound of tragedy—but its omen.
Later that evening, while Jerry went to the hospital to identify Bill, the police went on a man hunt, tracking Buddy Green and hardly believing where they finally found him.
About the Author
Cindi Brown is a Georgia-born writer, porch-sitter, and teller of truths — even the ones her mama once pinched her for saying out loud. She runs Porchlight Press from her 1895 house with creaking floorboards and an open door for stories with soul. When she’s not scribbling about Southern music, small towns, stray cats, places she loves, and the wild gospel that hums in red clay soil, you’ll find her out listening for the next thing worth saying.
