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

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СКАЧАТЬ pads placed under the carpets outside their bedrooms. ‘They were very expensive units, hooked directly up to police radio bands. Unfortunately, the only result was very, very many false alarms.’ Time and again, a woman would hear something, then press her button almost reflexively. Some did it so often that the police had to take their alarms away.

      ‘I got to know some of those women quite intimately,’ Smith said. ‘What I do remember is that when one of them raised the alarm, what seemed like the whole world of policing would show up within seconds. One night I was on patrol with a guy from the GBI [the Georgia Bureau of Investigation]. A call went out that a guy had heard screaming from the home of his neighbour, a widow. We weren’t more than half a mile away, but by the time we got there, we had to park three blocks from the house, there were so many law-enforcement vehicles there already.’

      Working with the help of official records, it took Smith hours of work to produce his list of possible victims.

      ‘How do you think the strangler managed to carry out his own profiling?’ I asked. ‘How did he work out where elderly women were living alone?’

      Smith paused for a long time. ‘We don’t know. Until the day I left the force, I had no idea how he selected his victims.’

      Anyone – especially anyone African-American – walking through Wynnton was likely to be stopped and asked to submit to a pro-forma ‘field interview’, with their personal details and movements for the past few days taken down and filed. Some were asked to give saliva and hair samples. Many of those stopped were students, on their way to the black high school in Carver Heights, and when they were questioned again and again, it aroused fierce resentment. However, flooding Wynnton with law-enforcement officers seemed to work.

      ‘We were not allowed in that neighbourhood – there’s no way that I could have gone through Wynnton after six or seven at night without being jumped on by every police car in the city,’ Gene Hewell said. ‘As a black man, you would have been asking for it – you could have driven through, but even now, twenty-seven years later, you couldn’t walk through without attracting attention.’

      Kathy Spano, a courthouse clerk, used to lie in her Wynnton bedroom, her radio tuned to the police communications channel. ‘There were so many people on the alert, constantly moving, responding to alarms, following leads with their dogs. I do not know how they could not have seen any black man in the neighbourhood. It would have been very difficult for him to move around. One night I heard they were chasing someone. Next day I asked how he’d got away. An officer told me they’d found some ground hollowed out beneath a bush.’

      Through the end of October, the whole of November and past Christmas, the strangler did not strike. As 1978 approached, Columbus began to hope that the murders had drawn to a close. In fact, the city’s serial killer was about to choose his most prominent target.

      If the intermarried Bradleys and Turners are the mightiest of all Columbus’s great families, close behind has been the dynasty of Woodruffs. Founded when George Waldo Woodruff moved south from Connecticut in 1847, the clan of his numerous descendants rose to become financiers, mill-owners, bankers and philanthropists. It was a Woodruff who put together the Columbus syndicate that bought Coca-Cola in 1919, while another later became its chief executive. By the middle of the twentieth century, George C. ‘Kid’ Woodruff, a fanatical sportsman who once coached his beloved University of Georgia football team for just $1 a year, was serving as President of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, and was one of the city’s most powerful men. After his death his widow, Kathleen, divided her time between a house at the Wynnton end of Buena Vista Road and a mansion in Harris County. As a young woman she had been among the writer Carson McCullers’s closest friends, and lived for a time in Paris. Now her two remaining passions in life were her garden and her grandchildren. In the winter of 1977, she was seventy-four.

      Kathleen’s home has since been torn down, but it used to lie in the open, close to the well-lit junction with Wynnton Road, the busiest in the neighbourhood. Through the autumn and early winter, it remained on the list of houses that the CPD had earmarked for regular checks by its special patrols. Shortly before Christmas, these patrols were scaled back, just as they had been after the arrest of Jerome Livas.

      The last person to see her alive apart from the strangler was her servant of thirty-three years, Tommie Stevens. At 5 p.m. on 27 December, Mrs Woodruff called her over to where she was sitting at the kitchen table, chequebook at the ready. The next day was Tommie’s birthday, and Kathleen gave her a gift of $20 before Tommie left for her own home in Carver Heights. ‘Next morning, when I came back – I always kept my own key – I unlocked the door and I noticed the light was on in her room, which it always be,’ she told the trial of Carlton Gary almost nine years later. It was between 10 and 11 a.m., and Tommie noticed nothing out of the ordinary. She was surprised that Mrs Woodruff wasn’t yet up, but went into the kitchen to make her some eggs for her breakfast. Only then did it occur to her that her employer ‘was sleeping mighty late’.

      ‘I decided to go see whether she was asleep,’ Tommie went on, ‘because I felt like she was sleeping late. And so, when I went in the bedroom and seen she was lying on the bed with the, you know, scarf around her neck and about half dressed and blood running down her cheek, and after I saw that, then I ran my hand across to see if she would bat her eyes, and she didn’t. And after that, I ran to the phone and called Mr Woodruff’ – George Junior, Kathleen’s son.

      Like the other victims, Kathleen Woodruff had bedroom closets and drawers containing numerous pieces of lingerie, yet she had been strangled with an item that had special meaning for her family – a University of Georgia football scarf. Only two years earlier, she and George Junior (another Georgia alumnus) had been photographed for the cover of the programme for a football game against Clemson University. Inside was an article about George Senior’s playing and coaching career. His uncle, Harry Ernest Woodruff, a brilliant young man who founded the real estate firm which both George Woodruffs (and the still-surviving George Woodruff III) went on to run, had also been on the University of Georgia team. (Harry died aged forty-one in a car crash in 1924, en route to the annual homecoming game between Georgia and the University of Tennessee.)

      Kathleen’s body displayed the same signs of strangulation as the other victims’, including the petechial haemorrhages and the fractured hyoid bone. Unlike the earlier victims, she had not been subjected to a massive blow to her head. She had, however, been raped.

      Two days after her murder, the enterprising reporter Carl Cannon heaped new humiliation on the CPD in another front-page story for the Columbus Ledger, published under the headline ‘Police Ended Special Patrol 2 Weeks Ago’:

      Special Columbus police patrols which had cruised past Kathleen K. Woodruff’s 1811 Buena Vista Road house every night since 25 October were called off two weeks ago because the ‘stocking strangler’ had been silent, police confirmed.

      The patrols were resumed Wednesday.

      The special details were ordered in late October following the stranglings of two elderly women within four days – the third and fourth stranglings of elderly Columbus women since September.

      Columbus waited in horror to see who the next victim would be, and when week after week passed without the dreaded news, many residents turned their thoughts to family, Christmas and other things …

      Commander Jim Wetherington, who was in charge of the special details, confirmed they were stopped a little before Christmas. Wetherington said the patrols would resume now.

      A police source said that the fruitlessness of the special patrols and the boredom felt by officers was a factor in calling off the special details.

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