Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose

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СКАЧАТЬ black citizens’ right to vote, and the Fourteenth, which promises ‘equal protection under the laws’. In and around Columbus, the absence of such protection was manifest. According to the ledger, only one of the perpetrators in the region’s thirty-two listed attacks was convicted and sentenced in court, a man named John Simpson, who killed Sammy Sapp in Muscogee County on 27 November 1867. Simpson, however, who was ‘tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang’, was ‘coloured’. Where white perpetrators were concerned, the outcomes of the cases described in the preceding paragraph typify the rest. K. Hocut’s killer, Nathaniel Fuller, was at least tried, but was acquitted. Although an inquest was held into the murder of Samuel Clemins, ‘no further action was taken by the civil authority’. Likewise, ‘the authorities have taken no action’ against Bud Vines, the man who shot Hiram McFir, and Vines ‘is supposed to be in Alabama’. The Freedmen’s Bureau officer who recorded the stabbing of Tom Joiner by Jesse Bennett knew that Bennett ‘lives near LaGrange’, but in his case too, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authorities’.

      One of the most odious aspects to the ethnic terror of the 1860s was the maiming and murder of African-Americans by the same individuals who had once owned them as property, and who seemed unable to adjust to the fact that if they still wished to put their former slaves to work, they would have to pay them. The first such case recorded in the ledger dates from July 1866, when an unnamed coloured man from Talbotton was ‘shot by his employer’. When Andrew Rawick stabbed John Brown in Troup County on 3 July 1868, ‘the difficulty originated about some work’, and when Austin and Dennis Hawley were ‘severely cut with [a] knife’ in Harris County two months later, it was because ‘the Hawleys demanded a settlement for work [they had] done’. In the same county on 20 October, Isaac Smith was killed by three unknown white men because he had ‘left a [work] place in the spring’.

      Two brothers from Harris County, William and Lewis Grady, appear to have taken special pains to exact vengeance from their former human property. On 4 August 1868 they ‘whipped very severely’ a man named David Grady; the fact that he shared their last name suggests that he had been their slave. The reason, states the ledger, was that ‘David had left [their] place because he did not get enough to eat.’ In this case, warrants were issued for William and Lewis Grady to attend court, but they did not answer them. A month later they again revealed their contempt for the law when they ‘shot and very severely whipped’ another African-American who bore their name, George Grady. As usual, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authority’. When the ledger closed at the end of 1868, the Grady brothers were still living with impunity a few miles north of Columbus in Harris County, Georgia.

      A pattern that would last many decades was beginning: racial violence and inequalities were simply matters beyond the rule of law. Long after the end of the 1860s, the fact that the law did not treat the races equally was among the first lessons black parents taught their children.

      ‘Sassing,’ said Gene Hewell, ‘you know what that means? To be rude, disrespectful. Our parents warned us about sassing from the cradle up. That didn’t just mean being careful what you said. It meant, you don’t mess with white people; you don’t talk to them, and you don’t talk back. If they do something you don’t like, you get out of their way. You could be walking down Broadway and if three white people came towards you, you got off the kerb. And if you didn’t, they could make it real ugly for you – arrest you, beat your brains out in jail.’

      In 1950, Gene said, a favourite uncle, ‘a big, muscular guy’, was murdered after getting into some kind of trouble with a white grocer – ‘They said he’d sassed him.’ After his death, his body was laid across the railroad tracks, and ‘cut up and pushed in pieces along the bridge towards Phenix City’.

      This climate of fear and vulnerability allowed other kinds of oppression and exploitation to flourish.

      ‘We’d come out of slavery, but we had to find a place to stay, and they owned the houses. You had to buy clothes, and they owned the stores. You had just about enough chump change to feed your children and go back to work each Monday. If you didn’t like your job, you couldn’t quit at one place and find work at another. That was blue-collar slavery.’

      The story of Gene’s own liberation, of how he came to buy his own downtown store and made it succeed, was a long saga of struggle against prejudice and hostility, against banks which refused to lend him money, and a Police Department that twice tried to ruin him by laying bogus charges – once for theft, and on another occasion for possessing planted drugs.

      For a few months before and after the end of 1977, at the time of the stocking stranglings, he’d employed a man named Carlton Gary, first as a sales assistant, and then as a TV advertisement model. ‘It was the Superfly era when clothes were flamboyant. Big boots, tassels, silk shirts and hats,’ Hewell said. ‘I used Carlton for the simple reason that he looked good. Real good. He was a very well built, extraordinarily attractive man, and he knew how to move, you know what I’m saying? He was a charmer, and when it came to women, he had the pick of the litter.’

      ‘How often did you show your adverts?’ I asked.

      ‘At busy times, like the weeks before Christmas, Carlton would have been appearing in five TV spots a night. I guess that made him kind of easy to recognise.’ Nine years after working for Hewell, Gary would find himself standing trial for the Columbus stocking stranglings.

      The rapes and murders of Florence Scheible and Martha Thurmond in October 1977, followed by Carl Cannon’s exposure of the CPD’s incompetence, plunged Columbus into a new abyss of fear. More than two decades later, in his chambers in the Government Center tower, I met Andrew Prather, a State Court judge who had lived alone in Wynnton at the time of the murders. Despite the belief that the killer was black, he said, any single man was regarded as a possible suspect: ‘There was a police car parked outside and I knew they were watching me. I thought of moving to Atlanta but then I thought, “What if I leave town and the killings stop?”’

      One night he found an old lady’s dog in the street. ‘I was scared to give it back. I thought I was going to get shot. I yelled through the door, “It’s Andy Prather! I live down the street and I’ve got your puppy!”’ His fears were well founded. In one reported incident, a woman fired a pistol through her glass front door when she saw the shadow of a friend and neighbour who was calling to check her well-being.

      As the police stumbled to make progress, they asked for help from the famous FBI criminal psychology profile expert, Robert K. Ressler. In his memoirs, Ressler writes of attending a social gathering during his visit: ‘A group of middle-aged and elderly women were at a party together, and the main topic of conversation was the mysterious series of killings. At one point in the evening, in a demonstration of how completely the fear of the killer had gripped the city, seven of the women guests emptied their purses, revealing seven handguns that fell out on to the carpet.’ Meanwhile, the local media advised single and widowed women to move in with male relatives, and if that were not possible, to form ‘communes’ for their own protection.

      Aware that he and his colleagues had no suspect, Detective Richard Smith and his partner, Frank Simon, decided to try prevention. Before the murders began, Smith had been responsible for a programme designed to protect store-owners from robbery – the Columbus Anti-Robbery Enforcement System, or CARES. Possible targets were identified, and then equipped with panic button hotlines to the police, who were supposed to respond immediately.

      ‘Now,’ said Smith in his New York office, gazing into the middle distance through a mist over Central Park, ‘I had to profile the elderly women and widows who lived alone in Wynnton, then go to them and tell them, as if they didn’t already know, that they were likely victims of the strangler. The harder task was to convince them that they were going to be safe, that we were going to protect them. They didn’t have family, so we were it.’

      Smith СКАЧАТЬ