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

If Worsley is indignant about the end of slavery, Sterling Price Gilbert, long a member of Georgia’s Supreme Court and arguably the most distinguished jurist Columbus has produced, is both egocentric and mawkishly sentimental. In his 1946 memoir A Georgia Lawyer, he writes of the liberation of his own family’s property:

The earliest recollection that I have of my home takes me back to the age of about three … Our cook and her son, Anderson, who was the yard boy and who had ‘looked after’ me were leaving. I had a strong attachment, almost love, for Anderson. He had been my bodyguard and my playmate. My heart was filled with sorrow, and I cried because he was leaving me. I went to the road with him and his mother. I can remember standing with feet apart, in the middle of the road, with tears streaming down my face, waving goodbye to my two friends. Every hundred yards or so, they would turn round and wave.

Justice Gilbert does not ask why his father’s chattels, given a choice for the first time in their lives, had elected to leave.

Telfair, Worsley and Gilbert were all writing in the twentieth century, but the Lost Cause legend had emerged much earlier, and Columbus played a direct and significant role in its formation. On 12 March 1866, less than a year after Wilson’s raiders torched the city’s factories, Miss Lizzie Rutherford, her cousin Mrs Chas. J. Williams and their friends in the Soldier’s Aid Society of Columbus began what was to become a totemic institution, Confederate Memorial Day. Mrs Williams, the daughter of a factory and railroad magnate, was married to a soldier who had, as Worsley writes, ‘served bravely in the war’. She composed ‘a beautiful letter’, which she had distributed to women, newspapers and charitable organisations throughout the South. Williams proposed

to set apart a certain day to be observed from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, and be handed down through time as a religious custom throughout the South, to wreath the graves of our martyred dead with flowers … Let every city, town and village join in the pleasant duty. Let all alike be remembered, from the heroes of Manassas to those who expired amid the death throes of our hallowed cause … They died for their country. Whether or not their country had or had not the right to demand that sacrifice is no longer a question for discussion. We leave that for nations to decide in the future. That it was demanded – that they fought nobly, and fell holy sacrifices upon their country’s altar, and are entitled to their country’s gratitude, none will deny.

Here was the core of Lost Cause mythology, what Blight describes as ‘deflections and evasions, careful remembering and necessary forgetting’, defined in a few sentences, as candid as they were succinct. If the true reason for the war was too painful to contemplate, then let it be dropped from discourse. Instead of asking whether all the devastation, loss and sacrifice had been justified, let them be venerated by the South’s revisionist history.

The seed sown in Columbus flourished and multiplied. By the end of the 1860s, there was barely a town which did not observe Mrs Williams’s ritual, with newly constructed memorial monuments, sometimes built in the greatly expanded cemeteries, as its focus. Similar observances began to be held in the North. Underlying them was a rhetoric of national reconciliation, of brotherhood renewed, in which Mrs Williams’s plea that the causes of the bloodshed be ‘no longer a question for discussion’ was accepted wholeheartedly. As the New York Herald put it in an editorial on Memorial Day 1877, ‘all the issues on which the war of the rebellion was fought seem dead’.

The only people written out of the script, in Columbus as elsewhere, were the former slaves. To them, in a Georgia stained by murder, exclusion, organised intimidation and a legal system of segregation that became more oppressive by the year, the issues for which the war had been fought did not seem dead at all. For black freedmen, reconciliation was possible only through submitting to white supremacy almost as completely as they had done before the torchlight parades and salutes that had heralded the war.

The Lost Cause legend did not die with the gradual entrenchment of civil rights, nor with the rise of a South where African-Americans have begun to serve as judges and elected politicians, and to gain access to business and social circles that were once impenetrably closed. In Columbus, hidden signs of a vision of the Confederacy as something heroic, a bulwark against the North’s alien values, lie as if woven into the streets. The local TV station, its logo reproduced on signs and billboards, is called WRBL – W-Rebel. It took a strike by black students in the 1980s to get the authorities at the local college (now Columbus State University) to see that to use ‘Johnny Rebel’ as the mascot for sports teams, black and white alike, and to ask them to parade before games to the strains of the Confederate anthem ‘Dixie’, was, at least for African-Americans, unacceptable.

On the shelves of the city’s bookstores I found the Lost Cause legend reproduced in an entire literary sub-genre of works such as The South Was Right, by James and Walter Kennedy, published in 2001. Railing against Northern historians’ ‘campaign of cultural genocide’, it maintains that the true story of the War Between the States is that ‘the free Southern nation was invaded, many of our people raped and murdered, private property plundered at will and their right of self-determination violently denied’.

Always lurking beneath Georgia’s surface, the strange and anachronistic wounded anger expressed by such discourse burst into the open in a protracted political struggle in the first years of the twenty-first century. In early 2001 I spent several weeks in Columbus, and daily studied the Ledger-Enquirer’s letters page. The State Assembly was debating a proposal to replace the Confederate battle flag as the official flag of the state, on the grounds that African-Americans saw it as a symbol of servitude and oppression; just as pertinently, transnational corporations which would otherwise have been investing in the state were expressing their reluctance unless the flag were changed. Not the least bizarre aspect of the debate was the fact that far from representing historical continuity, the Stars and Bars had only been readopted in 1956, as part of the state’s militant response to the US Supreme Court’s attempt to desegregate education. But to change the flag again, the Ledger-Enquirer’s incensed correspondents claimed, would be an intolerable act of vandalism.

‘The issue over the state flag is not altogether about heritage or hate or slavery. It is all about the blacks trying to force the white southerners to remove all symbols of the Confederacy from their sites, and they do not have the right to do that. If they choose to live in the South, they WILL have to look at it. Keep the flag flying!’ wrote Mr Danny Green. ‘The Confederate emblem should remain. There is [sic] 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 had noticed, she told Olive, that Ferne’s bronze-coloured Mercury Montego was parked in its usual space outside. Lucy was away to her own house, only a street away, by 9.45 p.m. Having spoken to her, Olive decided to phone the police.

Mrs Jackson, who was fifty-nine, had been Columbus’s Director of Public Health Education for twenty-six years. A widow, she had no children, and in her head-and-shoulders portrait she looks a little austere, as if the years of giving lectures on the dangers of smoking or the need for a healthy diet had begun to weary her. But she was much admired. She was about to be named Public Health Educator of the Year by the American Public Health Association. Her nephew, Harry Jackson, a successful businessman, was planning to run for Mayor.

When Jesse Thornton, the first police officer to respond to Dixon Olive’s call, arrived at Ferne Jackson’s house, he could see no sign that anyone had forced an entry. The doors were locked, the windows unbroken, and had he not been alerted by Mr Olive and some of Ferne’s neighbours, he would have been tempted to leave. But her car, they pointed out, was missing. Thornton spoke by radio to his patrol commander, who advised him to get inside the house and look around. He used the knife he always carried to remove the mesh insect screen from the living-room window, and to jiggle the lock until he could get it open.

Many years later, Thornton would tell a murder trial jury what he did next. The first space he came to was the hallway, and straight away, ‘I could see something that wasn’t right.’ Ferne’s approach to tidiness was as meticulous as her time-keeping. But in the hall, said Thornton, ‘There was stuff laying on the floor, papers, articles, just scattered all over the floor. There was a pillow on the floor, there was a suitcase that was opened, the drawers had been opened on the dresser, and stuff was pulled out and hanging out of it.’ He continued, very slowly, down the passage towards Ferne Jackson’s bedroom, his hand poised over his weapon. ‘Once I got to the bedroom, I looked inside,’ Thornton said. ‘That’s when I saw the body on the bed.’

Ferne’s sheets had been pulled up round her head, and her nightgown tugged upwards, in order to expose her hips, pubic area and waist. Thornton could see there was blood on the sheets.

It fell to the Columbus medical examiner, Dr Joe Webber, to conduct a post mortem. The killer, he wrote in his subsequent report, had tied a nylon stocking and a dressing-gown cord together to make a single ligature, which was wrapped around Mrs Jackson’s neck three times, leaving three ‘very deep crevasses’. There was a large area of haemorrhage and bruising on the left side of her face and head, so that the white of her left eye was ‘almost obliterated’ by bleeding; the result, he believed, of a massive blow to her head. The white of her right eye was a mass of tiny, pinpoint petechial haemorrhages where her blood, deprived of oxygen, had burst from its vessels close to the surface, a common sign of strangulation. The small hyoid bone at the front of the throat was fractured, and there was more bleeding inside her neck. Her brain was swollen, another symptom associated with an interruption to the blood supply. Her sternum, or breastbone, had been fractured, an act which would have required the application of enormous force: ‘It apparently had been flexed and pressure applied to the point that the bone snapped about midway between the upper and lower ends.’ Finally, her vagina was bloodied, torn and bruised. Although Dr Webber could not find spermatozoa, he felt it would be reasonable to conclude that Ferne Jackson had been raped. Later, traces of seminal fluid would be found on her sheet.

There was no obvious motive for Ferne’s murder. Despite ransacking her house, the killer had left her jewellery and other valuables untouched. She was still wearing two diamond rings. Nor did she have any enemies, and her popularity as a selfless public servant made her death all the harder to bear. ‘She was one of the unsung heroes who quietly, gently and persistently worked for the betterment of her community,’ Dr Mary Schley, a local paediatrician, told the Columbus Ledger. ‘Ferne Jackson fought for the underprivileged, the minority groups, and against poverty and for better mental health,’ added A.J. Kravtin, one of many readers who wrote to the paper after she died. While no one knew who was responsible, ‘if it turns out to be one of the above, they killed the wrong person. They killed a friend.’

Three days after the discovery of her body, the Ledger published an editorial in her memory. ‘It’s always tragic when an innocent person becomes the victim of a violent crime,’ it began, somewhat prosaically. ‘It’s even more tragic when the victim is someone who has devoted his or her life to helping others.’ What could be done about the kind of crime that had taken Mrs Jackson’s life, the paper asked, and how could further such acts be prevented? Increased police patrols would help. ‘Vigorous efforts to apprehend the assailant and assure him a swift trial and appropriate punishment, if found guilty, might deter others from committing similar crimes … Greater emphasis on respect for law and expanded educational and job opportunities might get at some of the underlying factors.’ It was not to be that simple.

Ferne Jackson was murdered barely a month after the capture of David Berkowitz, the sexually driven ‘Son of Sam’ who killed or seriously injured a dozen women in New York. Partly in response to Berkowitz’s bloody but compulsive career, Robert Ressler, the founder of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, had coined a new term to describe the perpetrators of such actions – they were, he suggested, ‘serial killers’. The phrase had swiftly gained widespread currency. It took just eight days after the murder of Mrs Jackson for it to become apparent that one was at large in Columbus.

Jean Dimenstein was seventy-one, a wealthy spinster from Philadelphia who owned and ran a small department store, Fred and Jean’s, with her brother. She spent the evening of 24 September with two friends at a steakhouse on Macon Road. They drove her home a little before 10 p.m., and watched from the car as she let herself into her house on Twenty-First Street, about half a mile from the residence of Mrs Jackson. As usual, she used the door at the side of the house, which led into her kitchen from her carport. Some time later that night, working in absolute silence, the killer removed the pins from the door’s hinges, laid them to one side and entered Miss Dimenstein’s house. Her sister-in-law, Francine, arrived there for coffee at ten the following morning. She noticed at once that Jean’s car was missing, saw the open doorway, and called the police.

Like Ferne Jackson, Jean Dimenstein had been beaten about the head, strangled with a ligature made from a stocking wrapped around her neck three times, and raped. She was wearing the two diamond rings and, beneath the ligature, the diamond necklace she had worn the previous night. Although her house was also ransacked, it appeared that again, nothing had been stolen. To the chagrin of the police, who were cautiously claiming that they couldn’t be sure that Jackson and Dimenstein had been killed by the same assailant, J. Donald Kilgore, Columbus’s coroner, told the Ledger of the similarities between the two murders. He was, he said, quite certain that there was only one Columbus strangler. As if the bubbling panic that began to seize the city needed further encouragement, Kilgore informed journalists of supposed details that were not borne out by later investigations: that ‘some sort of inflexible object was used to violate the women’, and that ‘a pillow was used to muffle their horrified screams while [they were] being tortured sexually before their death’. The motive for the crimes, he proclaimed, was torture.

In the autumn of 1977, Kilgore had been in his post for a year. He was not, however, a qualified forensic scientist, nor a pathologist, but the former director of a funeral home who had been embalming bodies with unusual enthusiasm since his teens. ‘By the time I was twenty-one, I had participated with embalming 1,500 bodies,’ he once told a Columbus reporter. ‘You’ve got to disassociate yourself from the body at such times, even if the body has been mutilated. You try to associate with something positive. For instance, I don’t see blood. I see ketchup.’ Kilgore said that ‘I treat every person’s body with respect. I always have.’ But as time went on, growing numbers of police officers came to disagree, accusing him of ‘aggressive investigation and handling of the remains’ at murder scenes. Some filed official complaints. In 1989, the tension between Kilgore and the Columbus Police Department (CPD) reached a new peak when he was accused of and investigated for allegedly decapitating a suicide victim. Under Georgia law, only a qualified medical examiner could cut into a body during a post mortem, and Kilgore was forced to admit that he often did so before such a person arrived. However, he insisted that he had not removed the victim’s head. He had merely ‘performed a procedure that involved the opening of the top portion of the skull’.