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

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СКАЧАТЬ no racial problems I know of. We gave blacks the right to ride in the front of the bus. Let’s not give them everything they want,’ added J.R. Stinson. A Mr Raymond King was more extreme: ‘Where does it end? It’s OK for a terrorist [sic], Jesse Jackson, to be revered as some kind of saint … but it’s not OK for us to honour our great Southern heritage. Bull! As far as I’m concerned, it’s the African-Americans that are full of hate because people like me will not bow down and give them a free ride in life.’

      In 2001, the flag-reform measure passed. Almost two years later, a Republican candidate for State Governor named Sonny Perdue ended many decades of Democrat stewardship after making a pledge to restore the Confederate flag the central plank of his campaign.

      I bought a copy of The South Was Right and took it home to England. It was only there, as I browsed one afternoon, that I noticed that someone had left a business card inside it, hidden between two pages. ‘National Alliance’, read a heading on the front, above a logo made up of a cross and oak leaves. ‘Towards a New Consciousness, a New Order; a New People’. Further details, complete with numbers for ‘Georgia hotlines’ and an address for a website, were printed on the reverse:

      We believe that we have a responsibility for the racial quality of the coming generations of our people. That no multi-racial society is a healthy society. That if the White race is to survive we must unite our people on the basis of common blood, organize them within a progressive social order, and inspire them with a common set of ideals. That the time to begin is now.

      I returned to Columbus in the autumn of 1998, two years after my first trip. This time, and for many subsequent visits, some of which lasted several weeks and others just a few days, my enquiries had a focus: the city’s most notorious series of crimes – the serial killings known as the ‘stocking stranglings’.

      In the late 1970s, a time when Jimmy Carter’s arrival in the White House was being said to mark the emergence of a new, racially harmonious, post-civil rights ‘sunbelt’ South, the fabric of the city was rent by seven exceptionally horrible rapes and murders. The victims – the youngest fifty-nine, the oldest eighty-nine – were all white women who lived alone, and all were strangled, most with items of their own lingerie. All but one had lived in the neighbourhood of Wynnton, and some were members of the city’s highest social echelons. From an early stage, while he still rampaged without apparent hindrance, the Columbus authorities had been convinced that the perpetrator was black.

      In the course of my research, I found myself keen to know more about the Big Eddy Club, the exclusive private social club on the banks of the Chattahoochee. The membership lists were confidential. But former staff told me that five of the women murdered by the strangler had been members or frequent visitors, together with many of the public officials whose job it became to capture and punish the man responsible for their deaths.

      It took time, and the assiduous cultivation of local contacts, before I was able to acquire an invitation to venture beyond the big iron gates bearing the legend ‘B.E.’ that guard the entrance to the club’s driveway. My lunch, as the guest of a delightful, politically liberal couple who made me promise not to jeopardise their social standing by thanking them in print, was adequate, if not exceptional – a salmon filet with wilted greens, slightly overdone, and a chocolate torte with mixed berries for dessert. It would not have won a Michelin star, but on the other hand, I had been living amid the fast-food and chain restaurants of Columbus, and it was the tastiest meal I had eaten for weeks. The service – from a pair of young black waiters – was efficient and polite, without being over-attentive. As for the surroundings, as one gazed through the dining room’s panoramic windows at the scene of utter tranquillity, it was difficult to imagine that Columbus had a long history of violence.

      After coffee in the lounge, I picked up my coat and made ready to leave. Elizabeth Senne, the maîtresse d’hôtel, saw me from the passageway and hurried over, detaining me at the door. She seemed awkward, agitated. ‘Please don’t make anything of the fact we haven’t got black members,’ she said, ‘and they do come as visitors. Really, they are very welcome.’ She touched my arm confidentially. ‘I think perhaps it’s the joining fee: it’s a lot to pay if you’re not sure you’re going to fit in.’

      ‘How much is it?’ I asked.

      ‘I can’t tell you that. But you know, most of the members are old families, and although newcomers are very welcome, there is a distinction. There is one guy who worked his way up from selling insurance. And although he’s seventy now, he’s still a newcomer. So maybe they sense that. You know what I mean?’

      The joining fee, I discovered later that day, was $7,500. On her veranda that same evening, I described the club to my African-American friend Vicky Williams, and mentioned Elizabeth’s closing remarks. Vicky laughed, surprised at the way some people chose to spend their money, then came up with an alternative hypothesis. Mrs Senne, of course, was an employee: she could not be held responsible for following the club’s policies. But Vicky said, with a bitter little shrug, ‘It’s like, you’re a reporter, and you’re good at getting people to tell you their stories, and maybe you can tell when they’re lying. That’s how it is as a black person, when you encounter racism. People can seem ever so nice, but sometimes, you can smell it.’

       TWO We’ve Got a Maniac

      The black fiend who lays unholy and lustful hands on a white woman in the state of Georgia shall surely die!

      REBECCA FELTON (1897)

      Hours after nightfall, when the last lights are going out and the only sound is the rustle of the pines and sweetgums on the balmy Georgia wind, the terror that enveloped Wynnton seems closer, more palpable. I’d planned to take a slow drive, to pause and stare at these moon-shadowed dwellings as once the killer saw them, in the moments before he pounced. My guide, a local architectural historian, kept hurrying me on. ‘People here might not like it if we dawdle,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to have to explain yourself to the police. Besides, a lot of people here have guns.’

      If one knew nothing of its history, Wynnton after dark might feel no different from any American neighbourhood. But knowledge cannot be undone, and despite myself I shared her unease. I had seen the crime scene photographs, and the passage of more than two decades had done nothing to diminish their horror. It wasn’t just the bodies, their swollen faces seeming to betray a heart-rending mix of fear and resignation. What conveyed the sense of violation most was the ordinariness of their surroundings.

      Inside the houses we were driving past, policemen’s cameras had captured life’s final debris. In one home, the story of a death struggle was told by large-print books, some still stacked neatly on their shelves, others strewn across a patterned carpet; in another, the floor was covered with an old lady’s intimate garments, ripped from closets, then used by the killer to fashion his weapon. Most poignant of all were the family photographs, still on their tables and dressers. Amid this everyday banality lay the victims: twisted, bruised, exposed.

      The horror began to surface at 10 a.m. on Friday, 16 September 1977. Dixon Olive worked in the city’s public health department and had been fretting indecisively for more than an hour. Mary ‘Ferne’ Jackson, his boss and colleague, had failed to show up for work. She was a woman of meticulous and unchanging routine, and Olive had already spoken to Ferne’s best friend, Lucy Mangham. Early the previous evening, Lucy said, she had picked up Ferne from her red-brick bungalow on Seventeenth Street in Wynnton, and they had gone together to what Lucy called ‘an enrichment school’ at St Luke’s United Methodist Church on Second Avenue, a spacious neo-Georgian edifice. Afterwards, Lucy took Ferne directly home, and waited by the kerb while she unlocked her door. She СКАЧАТЬ