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

Told of Jean Dimenstein’s murder while he was attending Sunday worship, Columbus’s Mayor, Jack Mickle, addressed reporters on her lawn, ringed by ten police cars. ‘We’ve got a maniac,’ he said. ‘I hope we get this guy. We gotta get this guy.’

The police had not been slow to notice that the cars belonging to both of the victims were found abandoned in Carver Heights, a black district on the southern side of Macon Road. Having examined the crime scenes and bodies, Donald Kilgore supported the CPD’s growing suspicion that the strangler was black. Later, he told reporters he had looked under the microscope at pubic hairs left at the crime scenes, and in his view, being black and curly, they displayed ‘Negroid characteristics’. In the Deep South of the United States, this was not an incidental matter.

In 1941 the Southern writer Wilbur J. Cash diagnosed what he termed the ‘Southern rape complex’, a social neurosis that originated long before the Civil War, and that continued to dominate whites’ approach to race relations for many decades afterwards. In the collective mind of the South, Cash argued, white women’s status was exalted to a bizarre and extraordinary degree, while their virtue was seen as at constant risk from the marauding, violating power of black sexuality. In part, he suggested, this was the product of guilt on the part of white male slave-owners at their own numerous illicit relationships with slave women, who often gave birth to mixed-race, light-skinned children. Soiled and shamed by their own desires and their inability to restrain them, white men projected an image of pristine chastity onto their wives and daughters, while assuming that black males must inevitably share their own lust for erotic miscegenation. By the time the Civil War broke out in 1861, writes Cash, ‘she was the South’s Palladium, the Southern woman – the shield-bearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds, the standard for its rallying, the mystic symbol of the nationality in the face of the foe … Merely to mention her was to send strong men into tears – or shouts.’

Columbus shared this dangerous fantasy. It could be found in purest form at the climax of Mrs Chas. Williams’s 1866 appeal on behalf of the city’s Soldiers’ Aid Society to newspapers and other kindred spirits that heralded the start of Confederate Memorial Day. In rousing, heartfelt language, Mrs Williams had claimed that the need to safeguard white female honour provided the noblest justification of all for the deaths of so many Southern men in pursuit of the doomed Lost Cause:

The proud banner under which they rallied in defence of the holiest and noblest cause for which heroes fought, or trusting woman prayed, has been furled forever. The country for which they suffered and died has now no name or place among the nations of the earth. Legislative enactments may not be made to do honour to their memories, but the veriest radical that ever traced his genealogy back to the Mayflower could not refuse thus the simple privilege of paying honour to those who died defending the life, honour and happiness of the Southern women.

After the South’s defeat, the slaves’ emancipation posed a new and terrible threat. Before the war, men such as Georgia’s Governor Brown had warned that if the slaves were freed, they would soon be asking for white women’s hands in marriage. Now that day had come to pass. In the summer of 1865, writes Nancy Telfair in her history of Columbus, ‘white women could not go alone on the streets’. The reason was that they were filled by black former slaves. As W.J. Cash put it, by ‘destroying the rigid fixity of the black at the bottom of the scale, in throwing open to him at least the legal opportunity to advance’, the abolition of slavery opened up a fearful vista in the mind of every Southerner. A war had been fought and lost to preserve white female honour. Though defeated, the white Southern male must fight still harder to protect it in time of peace. ‘Such,’ writes Cash, ‘is the explanation of the fact that from the beginning, they justified – and sincerely justified – violence towards the Negro as demanded in defence of women.’

Cash, of course, was white. African-Americans had noticed the effects of this rape complex long before his book was published in 1941. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the black activist writers Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. du Bois revealed how spurious rape allegations were used time and again by Southern whites to justify the wave of lynching, then at its terrible peak. Du Bois began his campaign when he investigated the torture and killing of Sam Hose in 1897 near Newnan, Georgia, a small farming town between Atlanta and Columbus. Hose, a farm labourer, had killed his employer, Alfred Crawford, in the course of a fight that started when he complained that he had not been paid his wages. When Hose disappeared, the local newspapers claimed he had also raped Crawford’s wife, Mattie, described before her marriage as ‘one of the belles of Newnan’. As vigilantes mounted a state-wide manhunt, the Newnan Herald and Advertiser warned the authorities not to interfere with the summary justice that must surely follow. Hose, it said, must be ‘made to suffer the torments of the damned in expiation of his hellish crime’, to demonstrate to all ‘that there is protection in Georgia for women and children’.

After his arrest near Marshallville, seventy-five miles to the south-east, Hose was transported to Newnan, where his death was deliberately delayed in order to magnify its spectacle. In front of a crowd of four thousand, many of whom had arrived aboard special trains from Atlanta, the mob slowly tortured him by slicing off his ears, nose, fingers and genitals, then burnt him at the stake. Already covered in blood, he was heard to cry ‘Sweet Jesus’ as the smoke entered his nose, eyes and mouth, and the flames roasted his legs; in a final, desperate struggle to break the chain which bound his chest, he burst a blood vessel in his neck.

Although an attempt had been made to get Mattie Crawford to identify Hose as her supposed rapist, she did not do so, and it seems improbable that she was raped at all. Du Bois commented: ‘Everyone that read the facts of the case knew perfectly well what had happened. The man wouldn’t pay him, so they got into a fight, and the man got killed – then, in order to rouse the neighbourhood to find this man, they brought in the charge of rape.’

The orator and writer Frederick Douglass, a former slave and arguably the greatest chronicler of the black experience of Emancipation and its aftermath, saw how the effects of bogus rape claims spread far beyond the places and people they directly involved. In the last speech of his life, delivered in Washington in January 1894, he argued that white propaganda about rape by blacks had become a device to justify their continued subjugation. ‘A white man has but to blacken his face and commit a crime, to have some negro lynched in his stead. An abandoned woman has only to start the cry that she has been insulted by a black man, to have him arrested and summarily murdered by the mob.’ Douglass quoted the recent words of Frances Willard, leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union: ‘The coloured race multiplies like locusts in Egypt. The safety of women, of childhood, of the home, is menaced in a thousand localities at this moment, so that men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof tree.’

The truth, Douglass pointed out, was that when most of the South’s white men had been away at the war, their women went unmolested. There was simply no substance to this ‘horrible and hell-black charge of rape as the peculiar crime of the coloured people of the South’. But its unchallenged prevalence in white society had terrible consequences, not only for the victims of lynch mobs but for black people as a whole: ‘This charge … is not merely against the individual culprit, as would be the case with an individual culprit of any other race, but it is in large measure a charge against the coloured race as such. It throws over every coloured man a mantle of odium.’ It underpinned the exclusion of blacks from politics and the right to vote, and the racial segregation of the so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws then being enforced throughout the South. The fear of rape had become the ‘justification for Southern barbarism’. Douglass ended by quoting the former Senator, John T. Ingalls. There need be no ‘Negro problem’, he said. ‘Let the nation try justice, and the problem will be solved.’

Another perspective emerges from Portrait in Georgia, a short and terrifying stanza by the black writer of the 1920s, Jean Toomer, in which he casts his erotic attraction for a white woman in the light of its likely consequence should his desire be fulfilled:

Hair – braided chestnut

Coiled like a lyncher’s rope

Eyes – faggots

Lips – old scars, or the first red blisters,

Breath – the last sweet scent of cane,

And her slim body, white as the ash

Of black flesh after flame.

The Southern rape complex could manifest itself with startling power when grounded in baseless fantasy. But even before Ferne Jackson’s murder, in the Columbus of the late 1970s, it was beginning to seem as if its racist account of African-American sexuality was a simple description of fact. On 30 November 1976 Katharina Wright, the nineteen-year-old bride of a military officer, who had lived in Columbus for only a fortnight, was raped, robbed and murdered by a man who entered her house on Broadway by posing as a gas company employee. The killer stole $480 in cash, and was said to have shot her as he left. The following September, just before the first stocking strangling, a mentally retarded black man named Johnny Lee Gates was convicted and sentenced to death for these crimes. (After many legal vicissitudes, his sentence was commuted to life without parole in 2003.)

Katharina Wright was German, and although the case attracted its share of news coverage, its impact was limited. Much more shocking to white Columbus was the killing of Jeannine Galloway on 15 July 1977, two months before the death of Ferne Jackson. In Galloway’s brutal slaying, it seemed that whites’ primordial fears had achieved realisation.

Galloway, aged twenty-three, was a blonde and beautiful virgin who still lived with her parents, and who devoted much of her leisure time to directing the choir at the St Mary’s Road United Methodist Church. A talented musician, she played the piano, organ, clarinet, saxophone and guitar, and was as happy playing jazz as Christian hymns. Her fiancé, Bobby Murray, met her when they were both students at the Columbus College music school. Before enrolling, he’d been on the road with a rock band; after taking advice from one of her friends, he cut his hair and shaved his beard in order to impress Jeannine. On trips with the college jazz big band, other musicians ‘would sneak a beer or smoke marijuana’, Bobby told the Ledger. ‘Partaking of neither, Jeannine would still be in the middle of the action. Somebody would say, “Have a drink. Have fun.” She’d get real quiet and tell them right quick, “I am having fun.” She got high on life.’

For years after her murder, the Columbus newspapers continued to run long feature articles about her, on significant anniversaries of her passing, or when some development occurred in the case of her killer, a young African-American criminal named William Anthony Brooks. In these memorials, her qualities came to be described as belonging more to heaven than earth. ‘She was just an angel, a bright and shining light who was just every father’s dream,’ her church’s Reverend Eric Sizemore told reporters after one legal milestone in 1983.

There is no way to mitigate the horror of her murder. Early in the morning of her death, Jeannine was putting out the garbage, chatting to her mother, who stayed inside the house. She bent down to leave the bin, then straightened and came face to face with William Anthony Brooks, a young African-American. He was holding a loaded pistol, which he used to force her into her own car and drive to an area of marshy wasteland behind a school two miles away.

‘She was continually asking me to let her go – to take her money and the car and let her go,’ Brooks told the police after his arrest, a month later, in Atlanta. Instead, he marched her into a wood: ‘I told her to take her clothes off and she said no, and I yelled at her to take her clothes off.’ After raping her, Brooks’s statement continued, he asked if this had been the first time that she had had sex. ‘She said yes, and I said I didn’t believe it. She started screaming and wouldn’t stop and I pulled out my gun so she’d know I was serious … she kept screaming and the pistol went off. She kept trying to scream but she couldn’t get her voice.’ Jeannine died slowly, bleeding to death from a small-calibre bullet wound in her neck.

Brooks was tried in November 1977, two months after the first stocking strangling. At the start of the case, District Attorney Mullins Whisnant objected to every African-American in the jury pool, in order to ensure that the twelve men and women who would decide Brooks’s fate were white. At the end of the penalty phase he made his closing appeal, imploring the jury to send Brooks to the electric chair: ‘You have looked at William Anthony Brooks all week, he’s been here surrounded by his lawyers, and you’ve seen him.’ Having seen him, of course, the jury knew he was black.

Brooks, Whisnant said, had treated Jeannine ‘worse than you would a stray animal’. Not content with ‘raping her, with satisfying his lust’, he had let her die ‘very slowly, drip by drip, drop by drop … if you sat down and tried to think up a horrible crime, could you think anything more horrible than what you’ve heard here this week, that this defendant committed on this young lady? Could you think of anything more horrible?’

The defendant, Whisnant said, might be only twenty-two, but rehabilitation was quite impossible: he had been in trouble since he was a child. (As a teenager, Brooks had been arrested for car theft.) Fellow prisoners and guards would be at constant risk of a murderous attack if he lived. The defence was asking for mercy because Brooks had been brutally abused as a child, but for Whisnant this was just an excuse: ‘His sisters talked to you about him being beaten by his stepfather, but they never did say what his stepfather was beating him for. Maybe he needed it. There’s nothing wrong in whipping a child. Some of them you have to whip harder than others. And there’s been children who have been abused and beaten, but they don’t turn to a life of crime on account of it.’

He concluded by appealing to the jurors’ social conscience. Columbus was fighting a war, and men like Brooks were the enemy:

And you can do something about it. You can bring back the death penalty and you can tell William Brooks, and you can tell every criminal like him, that if you come to Columbus and Muscogee County, and you commit a crime … you are going to get the electric chair. You can think of it this way. You know from time to time, if you were a surgeon, and you have people coming to you and maybe they have a cancer on their arm, and you look at it, and you say, ‘Well, the only way to save your life is to take your arm off.’ Or maybe he’s got cancer of the eye, and you have to take his eye out. Sure, that’s terrible, but it’s done because you save the rest of the body. And I submit to you that William Brooks is a cancer on the body of society, and if we’re going to save society and save civilisation, then we’ve got to remove them from society.

Amid the sea of white faces inside the courtroom, that last ‘them’ might easily have been interpreted as a reference not to tumours but to African-Americans. In less than hour, the jury voted to put Brooks to death.

Six years later, in 1983, the Federal Court of Appeals for the US Eleventh Circuit stayed Brooks’s execution eighteen hours before his scheduled death, because of its concern about Whisnant’s rhetoric and the exclusion of blacks from the jury. After another six years of bitterly contested hearings, Brooks was sentenced to life without parole. Removed from death row, the man whom Whisnant had deemed beyond rehabilitation took his high school diploma, and then began to study for a university degree.

The racial connotations of the murders of 1977 were not lost on those who had to investigate them. In a cavernous, oak-panelled suite at his thirty-seventh-floor office in Manhattan, blessed with a dazzling view of Central Park, I interviewed Richard Smith, once a Columbus detective, now the chief executive of the Cendant Corporation’s property division, Coldwell Bankers – the largest real-estate business in the world. The former cop was now responsible for twenty thousand employees, and an annual turnover of $6.5 billion.

The son of a soldier based at Fort Benning, Smith said he’d been faced with a choice of flipping hamburgers or joining the police to pay his way through college. He chose law enforcement, serving from 1973 until 1979 and acquiring two degrees. By 1976 he was a detective, and soon rose to working the robbery-homicide section. Smith spoke in a soothing, understated manner which matched his well-tailored light grey suit and navy shirt. Though he had a very different life now, he stayed in touch with his friends and colleagues from Columbus, which he visited several times a year. He had worked on both the Galloway and the stocking strangler cases, and his obvious intelligence had made him the effective operational leader of the ‘task force’ established to investigate them.

‘Did the fact that it appeared to be an African-American raping and killing white women add to the impact of the crimes?’ I asked.

The easy flow of Smith’s conversation became more broken. ‘Probably. A bit. Yes: that added to the trauma.’ He cleared his throat, and his face began to colour. ‘The old South has great respect and admiration for elderly people, and to see someone treated that way was incredibly offensive. Retired women are supposed to be untouchable people. Nothing is supposed to happen to them. Most of us took it very personally.’

White women shared his sense of revulsion. At the time of the murders, Kathy Spano, who went on to work in Columbus’s courts, was living with her parents in Wynnton. ‘I knew some of the women who died,’ she told me. ‘They were typical Southern gentlewomen, used to being put on a pedestal. I remember them as very gracious women, and also my mother saying, “Oh, it’s awful what they’ve gone through. I cannot imagine laying there as a black man did those things to me.” Because it was a black man, in the eyes of the neighbourhood, it made his crimes much, much worse.’

The body that had to deal with this mayhem, the Columbus Police Department, had not been a happy organisation for many decades. In the 1960s and early seventies, a series of corruption scandals saw officers fired for accepting bribes and taking part in large-scale burglary rings. Earlier, during the 1940s, no one got a job with the CPD without a nod from Fate Leebern, a bootlegging gangster who ran Columbus’s rackets. Among African-Americans, the CPD had had a reputation for racism since the days of Jim Crow, directed both at black Columbus citizens and at the minority of black officers within its ranks, who were forbidden to arrest white suspects, and worked only ‘black beats’. In the late 1960s, just one of the city’s fifty-two black officers had been promoted to sergeant, and none above that rank. Whites received higher pay.

One freezing January night I drove to south Atlanta to meet Robert Leonard, an African-American former Columbus patrolman. A stooped, haunted figure, he told me that together with some of his black colleagues, he had joined the force after returning from service in Vietnam. There they had grown used to something like equality. It was warm inside Leonard’s house, but as he recalled his experience, he shivered.

‘We’d been out there fighting for our country. When we got to the Department, they wouldn’t let us drink from the water fountains. They were reserved for whites. We had to go down to the basement, and drink the water they used for washing patrol cars.’

In 1971, Leonard was going to night school, studying for a degree in police science.

‘There were only two blacks in the class, and it seemed to me that the captain who was taking the class was deliberately marking us down. So a white cop and me, we had a discussion, and agreed to swap papers. I knew my paper was good, and when he turned it in under his name, he got an A. His paper was pretty good too. When I turned it in under my name, I made a C.’

Leonard and the other African-American officers tried to tackle the rampant discrimination by founding a new organisation – the Afro-American Police League. They attempted to make formal representations to the CPD, but its chiefs retaliated swiftly. One black cop was arrested for contempt by his white colleagues when he failed to make a court date, despite having called in sick, said Leonard; another was fired for damaging patrol-car tyres – after risking his life chasing a suspect.

‘They started chopping us off, one by one. It got to the stage where relations between black and white cops had gotten so bad that we were pulling guns on each other. White cops I knew were calling me at home and making threats to me and my mother.’

Finally, in the spring of 1971, Leonard decided ‘it was time to get something done’. He arranged to fly to Washington DC and meet officials from the Justice Department. As he boarded his plane, he realised he was being tailed – by two CPD detectives.

‘I explained to the Justice Department that we wore the flag of the United States on our uniforms, that it stood for liberty and justice, and we weren’t getting any.’ The officials promised to look into it. But soon after Leonard’s return, he was called one night to the Columbus Medical Center, the city’s main hospital, where a doctor had got drunk and was threatening patients and nurses.

‘I told him he was under arrest. He turned to me and said, “Nigger, you can’t say that.” So I cuffed him. Then a captain came and called another white colleague. They suspended me from duty for eight days.’

On the afternoons of 29 and 30 May 1971, Leonard and some of the Afro-American League members held a small demonstration outside the police headquarters. Their protest reached its climax the following day, when ten of them, including Leonard, carefully removed the US flag from their epaulettes, stitch by stitch.

‘We had the media there, and we tried to explain that the flag represented what we’d fought for in Vietnam and couldn’t find in Columbus. There was no liberty or justice inside the CPD, and it was treating black people in the city with brutality. The chief came out of the building and faced us. He looked at us with hate in his eyes and said, “You’re fired.” He went along the line and took our shields and our weapons.’

Later that day, the CPD held a press conference, confirming that Leonard and six others had been dismissed for ‘conduct unbecoming an officer’. Columbus’s Safety Director, Joseph W. Sargis, told reporters: ‘These officers have repetitiously made baseless allegations of unlawful conduct, racism and discrimination against their fellow officers.’ The chief and his men had ‘exercised patience and forbearance concerning the conduct individually and as a group by these officers who call themselves the Afro-American Police League’. Beside him on the platform, two senior cops nodded vigorously – the CPD chief, B.F. McGuffey, and his future successor, Curtis McClung.

The black officers’ dismissal triggered a wave of protest, which was further fuelled in early June when the police shot dead a twenty-year-old African-American whom they claimed had been a robbery suspect. On Saturday, 19 June, the civil rights leader Hosea Williams of the Southern Leadership Christian Council led a demonstration by about a thousand people in support of the fired seven, demanding the reorganisation of the CPD on racially equal lines. Mayor J.R. Allen denounced his proposals as ‘an attack upon this city and its citizens’ by ‘a group of outsiders with no legitimate concern here’. The demands being made by Williams and the former patrolmen ‘could only be described as an extortion note’.