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

Mayhem followed. For three nights, Columbus was afflicted by rioting and arson, with grocery stores, a lumberyard and a confectionery company fire-bombed and set ablaze. Firemen and their trucks were shot at, and their hoses cut. At 1.10 a.m. on 22 June, Mayor Allen declared a state of emergency. In Columbus, Allen – who died a few months later in a plane crash – is remembered today as a reformer who believed in racial integration. On this occasion he acted like a medieval monarch, and issued an ‘ordinance’ by proclamation. Bars, liquor stores and shops selling guns and ammunition would be closed until further notice. Notwithstanding the Constitution of the United States, and its First Amendment protecting free speech, any gathering on the streets of Columbus of more than twelve people would be illegal, and its members subject to arrest. Protest marches would only be allowed if their organisers had obtained a permit from the Mayor’s office in advance. Allen was buoyed by a message of support from Georgia’s Governor, the Democratic future President Jimmy Carter. He too denounced Hosea Williams: ‘There is no evidence he wants to solve problems. He wants to create one.’

As sporadic rioting and arson continued, Columbus’s long hot summer reached its violent zenith on 24 July, with a march – banned under the Mayor’s emergency ordinance – to the CPD headquarters. Later, the police – inevitably – claimed that they were trying to disperse it peacefully, and only used force when they came under attack. Equally inevitably, accounts by surviving black participants are very different.

‘Before we started, pickaxe handles had been handed out to the cops, and they just beat us,’ Leonard said. ‘Men, women and children. Some of the kids and women got real scared, started running. I was walking with a woman who was pregnant and this cop said, “Hey Leonard, you hiding behind a pregnant woman?” He beat me on the head, knocked me to the ground, fractured my skull. Somehow I got away and ran to an old lady’s house. I was taken to hospital in Fort Benning, because I was a veteran. They arrested me in hospital, for assaulting a cop.’

By the end of the day, five police officers and five marchers had been hospitalised with serious injuries. The following week, another demonstration was broken up and eighty-one people arrested and jailed. Trouble simmered for the rest of the summer: by the time of the last conflagration, on 6 September, Columbus had seen 161 fires set by arsonists – some of them, it was widely believed, by whites, motivated not by anger at police brutality but by the prospect of making insurance claims.

As for the seven fired patrolmen, they launched a federal lawsuit that took twenty-two years to resolve. Three times Columbus’s Federal District Judge, Robert Elliott, an old-time segregationist, refused to entertain it; three times the US Supreme Court and other appeal judges insisted that he should. Finally, the case was settled out of court, and the former patrolmen were each awarded $133,000. But the emotional cost had been overwhelming.

‘I was warned by my own lawyer: leave town or face getting killed,’ said Leonard. ‘So I came here to Atlanta. All of us lost our jobs, our wives, our homes. My first wife was a schoolteacher in Columbus, and she was threatened, told she’d lose her job. One time I was unemployed and couldn’t make my child support payments. Columbus had me jailed.’

The Columbus Police Department badly needed a new broom, and with the appointment of Curtis McClung as its chief in 1976, one seemed to have arrived. Possessed of a degree in police sciences, he was skilled at handling the media, and wanted to be seen as a new model police chief, not a backwoods lawman. On first taking office, he told reporters that he was determined to expunge the stains left by the events five summers before. Nevertheless, experienced black investigators, who might have had much to contribute to the hunt for the stocking strangler, were swiftly excluded from it. Early in his service in 1967, Arthur Hardaway had been the first black patrolman assigned to the downtown Broadway beat, responsible for a business district that was then entirely white: ‘The chief called me in and told me no black officer had ever walked Broadway,’ Hardaway said. ‘He wanted to determine the reaction of the whites and he thought I had the personality to be able to do it.’ That experiment passed off successfully: ‘The business people accepted me pretty good; treated me with respect, invited me in and offered me Cokes, like I guess they did the white officers.’

The stranglings were a very different matter. Hardaway had been a detective since 1968, working mostly in robbery-homicide, and had solved several murders. ‘When the stranglings began, I did a few door-to-door interviews. But when they formed a special task force to investigate them, I wasn’t picked for it, though I was one of the top investigators, and I’d worked on that squad a long time. I didn’t know then if it was a white man or a black man who had committed those crimes. But the victims were influential people and they still had that racial concern in their heart in Columbus. The people who were making decisions still had that racist mentality.’

Hardaway spent years acquiring an impressive list of academic qualifications, only to see a long line of less experienced and less well-educated white officers promoted over his head. A methodical, unassuming man, he answered my questions in his south Columbus living room with the same precision he had once applied to murder cases, despite having become partially deaf. He left the force a disillusioned man in 1992, to scratch out a living as a small-time building contractor.

He was not the only skilled black investigator to be left out. There was no more experienced fingerprint expert on the Columbus force at the time of the stocking stranglings than Eddie Florence, the cop who later turned to real estate and religion after leaving the force. He told me that he’d always kept abreast of the latest developments in identification techniques, and ensured that the city had the most modern technology. Yet he wasn’t called to any of the strangling crime scenes. He had left the police in 1984, but his bitterness was still near the surface.

‘You had to be part of that madness to know what it was really like. The pressure, not just in the Police Department, but across the whole city was incredible, and it was being applied right in the middle of the racial divide. But the shit they put on me: not trusting me to take part in the investigation because they thought the killer was black!’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose they thought I’d try to fudge the evidence.’

After the second strangling, the murder of Miss Dimenstein, Chief McClung announced that all police leave was cancelled indefinitely. Staff who normally worked on administrative duties were moved to the streets to join new, intensive patrols, especially in Wynnton. Both the city and the state pledged money for a reward fund. Within a week it stood at $11,000, a substantial sum in 1977. And then, nine days after Dimenstein’s death, came the break Columbus had been praying for.

Jerome Livas, an African-American odd-job man aged twenty-eight, lived in south Columbus with a much older woman – Beatrice Brier, who was fifty-five. Early on Sunday, 2 October, she was found by the porch of her home, beaten and unconscious. As her partner, Livas immediately became a prime suspect. He was arrested and questioned by two detectives, Gene Hillhouse and Warren Myles. Livas, a short, muscular man who looked older than his years, was illiterate and easily confused. The detectives, he said years later, told him that if he confessed to beating Beatrice Brier, he could go home. He quickly fell for this transparent ploy, and told them that he had. Six days later she died from her injuries, and although he retracted it, his confession was enough to secure him a life sentence for murder.

Hillhouse and Myles were intrigued by the wide age gap between Livas and Brier, and wondered whether his interest in older women might mean he had strangled Ferne Jackson and Jean Dimenstein. They began to question him about their murders, and as they talked, they made notes of everything they told Livas about what had happened. They were well aware of the danger of generating a completely bogus ‘confession’ to the crimes, containing nothing but recycled information their suspect had learned from them. Unbeknown to Myles and Hillhouse, after they went home at the end of the day, three more detectives – Ronald Lynn, Robert Matthews and Robert Coddington – continued the interrogation. They were much less careful, and made no note of their questions. Their interrogation lasted for much of the night.

Around midnight, the cops bundled Livas into a police car and drove him to the scenes of the murders. Along the way, they also drove by the Wynnton home of another possible victim of the strangler, Gertrude Miller, aged sixty-four, who had been beaten and raped, but not murdered, five days before Mrs Jackson was attacked. At each house, the detectives made Livas get out, lighting the shadows with powerful torches in the hope that this would enhance his recollections, and make them more vivid.

By 2.45 a.m. on 3 October, they had a full, typed confession. In the bare police interrogation room they read it back to Livas, and he marked it with the one thing he knew how to write, his name. It was an impressive document, filled with details about the murders which had not been made public, and which, journalists were later told, ‘only the killer could have known’.

Livas’s statement began with an account of the rape of Gertrude Miller – a crime that had been given no publicity. He said he managed to enter her home by pulling the screen off her back-room window, hit her on the side of the head with a mop handle, and tied her hands and feet with stockings. Then, Livas supposedly said, ‘I took her clothes off. I fucked her for a little while and pulled my dick out and ate her pussy a little bit and then fucked her some more. When I got through fucking her, I hit her some more with the stick.’

According to Livas’s confession, he decided to attack Ferne Jackson after seeing her get out of a car being driven by someone else and go inside her house. The police, of course, knew she had been dropped at her home by her friend Lucy Mangham. The rest of Livas’s account was a close match with other known facts:

I waited down the street on the corner until I didn’t see no lights on at the house. I went to the house and went up on the porch where some glass doors were. I had a screwdriver with me. I stuck the screwdriver in the right side of the door and forced the lock. I went in the door and looked around the house and found an old woman asleep in the bed in the bedroom. She had on some type of gown. I put my hand over her mouth and she tried to move. I hit her pretty hard in the eye with my fist. I raised her gown up. I started fucking her in the pussy and then I ate her pussy. She was crying while I was fucking her. I was buck fucking her with her legs pulled up toward her head. I looked around in some drawers and found a stocking. I wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled it tight and tied it in a knot.

Livas said he stole his victim’s car and left it on a dirt road off Lawyers Lane in south Columbus, exactly where Mrs Jackson’s vehicle had been found. His confession to murdering and raping Jean Dimenstein was equally vivid and, seemingly, accurate. Having tried to open a window, he said, he went round to the port where her car, a blue Chevrolet, was parked:

I took the hinges off the door. I threw them out in the backyard. I took the door off and set it to the side … I found an old woman in the bedroom asleep. I put my hand over her mouth and she was trying to wake up. I hit her with my fist. I don’t remember where I hit her. She had on some kind of housecoat. She had on a pair of panties. I took her panties off and threw them down. Then I pushed her legs back and buck fucked her. Then I ate her pussy a little bit. I got a stocking from a chair and wrapped it round her neck and choked her … I went out the same door I came in and got in [her] car and left. I put the radio station on WOKS because I always listen to it. I took the car pretty close to where I left the last car but left it on a paved street this time.

Dimenstein’s car radio – as the police, but not the press, knew – had indeed been tuned to WOKS when it was found on a paved road in Carver Heights.

Three days later, on 6 October, the police showed Gertrude Miller, the woman who had apparently survived the strangler’s attack, an array of photographs. She picked out Livas. His picture, she said, was the one that looked most like the man who raped her, and had ‘all the right features’. It looked as if the case was nailed. On 14 October, the Deputy Police Chief C.B. Falson, the robbery-homicide squad director Ronnie Jones, and his deputy, Herman Boone, called a press conference. Jerome Livas, they announced, was officially a suspect for the stranglings. If convicted, he could expect to be sentenced to death.

Even then, there were some members of the CPD who had their doubts. Carl Cannon, a young reporter with the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, spoke to an anonymous police source who told him Livas was a ‘twenty-four-carat idiot with the intelligence level of a five-year-old’. Another said Livas had not understood the contents of his own confession, let alone the implications of signing it without having seen a lawyer: ‘Explaining that to him is like explaining Einstein’s quantum theory of physics [sic] to a three-year-old.’ Livas’s employer, William Renfro, told Cannon he was ‘slow, illiterate and stupid’, and would ‘say anything’. But Chief McClung was confident the police had got their man. The special patrols in Wynnton were stood down.

Florence Scheible was a widow of eighty-nine, almost blind, and walked only with the aid of a Zimmer frame. Originally from Iowa, she moved to Columbus because she liked its warm weather. On the morning of 21 October, while Livas remained in custody, her neighbours saw her outside at about 11 a.m., shuffling in the garden in front of her two-storey house on Dimon Street, a few blocks from the murders. Three-and-a-half hours later, her son Paul, a colonel in the military, called the police, saying he had come to visit and found her dead.

Ed Gibson, a CPD patrolman, went inside, into the tidy living room. Antique furniture and a rug stood on a polished hardwood floor; there was a television in the corner. Mrs Scheible was lying on her bed in the bedroom next door, next to her walker. Her dress had been pulled above her waist, exposing her pubic area, which was covered in blood. She was wearing one nylon stocking. The other had been wrapped around her neck.

In the wake of Florence Scheible’s murder, Columbus was seized by dread. The special patrols reappeared, joined by soldiers from Fort Benning and volunteers from other jurisdictions. Like many women who lived alone, Martha Thurmond, a retired teacher aged sixty-nine, decided not to risk relying on these measures. The day after the discovery of Mrs Scheible’s body, she had deadbolt locks fitted to the doors, and burglar bars fixed to the windows of her house on Marion Street, a small, wood-framed dwelling just off Wynnton Road. Her son Bill, who lived in Tucker, a suburb of Atlanta, came down with his wife and son to stay for the weekend, wanting to be certain that she would be safe. They left for home at about 3.30 p.m. on Monday, 24 October.

At 12.30 p.m. next day, a neighbour noticed that Mrs Thurmond’s front door was open. The new lock had not been properly fitted, and working in silence, the killer had forced it during the night. She was inside, on her bed, wearing a pink pyjama top; taped to the wall above her was a large sheet of paper with a phone number written in large characters: 322–7711 – the number for the Columbus Police Department. Like Florence Scheible, she had been hit with enormous force, by a blow that fractured the base of her skull. The stocking ligature had been tightened so fiercely against her skin that it had caused a friction burn, a brownish red, blistered trough against her windpipe. In and around her vagina were copious quantities of seminal fluid.

Driven to desperation, Mayor Mickle tried to reduce the chances of another murder by cancelling Halloween. Parents, he told reporters, should ensure their children were home by 6 p.m. on 31 October. Trick or treating was forbidden.

With the police investigation and the reputation of his department in disarray, Chief McClung continued to claim that Jerome Livas might still have killed the first two victims. ‘The evidence against him still exists,’ he told reporters. I met the Ledger’s former crime correspondent Carl Cannon in a cellar bar in Washington DC, where his career has prospered as the White House correspondent for the National Journal. Warm and approachable, he vividly recalled the events of his reporting youth twenty-five years earlier. His father had been a big-time Washington reporter before him, and unlike most Columbus journalists, he always knew he was only passing through, and could afford to make enemies.

‘They were still using that hoary old line – Livas had said things that only the killer could have known – and when Mrs Scheible was killed, they added another: that there had to be a copy-cat killer. I’d already had some experience with the Columbus cops and their tendency to rush to judgement. But I had a source in the department who used to call me at home. He told me it was bullshit: the murders were the work of the same guy. He said Livas had this urge to please. He’d confess to anything.’

Cannon managed to enlist the help of a judge to get him access to Livas in jail. Left alone with Cannon, Livas signed another statement within a couple of hours. This time, he not only confessed again to the first two Columbus stranglings, but admitted that it had been he who had assassinated two Presidents, John F. Kennedy and William McKinley; that he had been with Charles Manson the night his followers murdered the actress Sharon Tate; that he had known when Charles Lindbergh’s baby was going to be kidnapped in the 1930s; and that he knew Elizabeth Short, the victim of the notorious ‘black dahlia’ murder in Cannon’s home state of California the following decade. Cannon asked him if knew what the word ‘suspect’ meant. Livas replied: ‘That means you’re trespassing on private property or something.’ The one crime he vehemently denied was the only one for which he was to be convicted – the murder of his girlfriend, Beatrice Brier.

Twenty-three years old, Cannon had the scoop of his career thus far. After staying up all night transcribing his notes and tapes, he had his story ready to run for the evening edition of 17 November 1977. Shortly before his deadline, he called on Chief McClung. Cannon recalled: ‘He got up, walked to the window, looked out. He said, “You know, Carl, I’ve got a lot of people here but no one doing public affairs to get our stories out to the public, not like the Army has.” He asked me what I earned, and suggested he might be able to double it. I told him: “I tell you what, Chief. This story’s going to come out in two hours, and everyone’s going to know that this guy didn’t do it. But I’m not, on this occasion, going to tell the readers about our conversation.”’

Meanwhile, Columbus’s maniac remained on the loose.

THREE Ghost-Hunting

And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been … The history of my people will be commensurate with the interminable history of the Jew – only bloodier and more violent.

Benedict Mady Copeland in CARSON McCULLERS,

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)*

At his hilltop home at the upscale end of south Columbus, Gene Hewell was tending his garden. Now sixty-five, he moved smoothly, wielding his hoe without apparent effort, his only concession to the heat and humidity a straw boater. I was sweating the moment I got out of my car, but his breathing was rhythmic, his skin dry. In the distance, the towers used for parachute training at Fort Benning seemed to shimmer above the trees. Gene gestured towards the west. ‘That’s where my great-grandmother worked as a slave,’ he said. ‘On a plantation at a place called Oswichee, in Russell County, Alabama. It was owned by the first W.C. Bradley’s father.’

Gene, the brother of the singer Jo-Jo Benson, owned a men’s fashion store on Broadway, the Movin’ Man – the first, and for many years the only, black-owned business on the street. Inside his house, in the welcome cool of his living room, Gene eased himself into a sofa beside an impressive collection of guitars. Like his brother, he had lived in Columbus or Phenix City for most of his life, and his family had been in the district for much longer than that.

‘My great-grandmother told my grandma about the day they freed the slaves, and she told me and Jo-Jo,’ Gene said. ‘She said that she was out in the fields, chopping cotton – chopping at the stalks to let the plants get more nutrients. Then she heard this noise. A crackling, was how she explained it. She looked up at the ridge above the field where she was working and all she could see was a blue line of white people, running by the master’s house. Some of the people there were trying to shoot at them, and they were trying to get in. She said she’d never seen so many whites killing so many whites.’

Afterwards, with the plantation secure, the Union soldiers called the slaves from the fields in order to tell them that Lincoln had set them free. Addressing a hushed semi-circle of African-Americans in the shade of a tree, an officer read the Emancipation proclamation. As he did so, Gene said, one of his men idly bounced his rifle on the toe of his boot. ‘The gun went off and clean shot off his toe. My great-grandmother pulled his boot off and dressed the wound. Then he pulled it right back on.’

When the federal army left later that afternoon, some of the former slaves followed it, because they were scared of reprisals from whites. According to the oral history handed down among the Chattahoochee Valley’s African-Americans, their fears were justified.

‘My grandma told us that the day after the Yankees left, all down through the woods near the plantations, there were black people nailed to trees,’ Gene said. ‘They were dead, like butchered animals. Instead of being set free, they were killed.’

In the National Archives in Washington DC, in the Georgia section’s records of the federal agency set up to assist the former slaves, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, I found a ledger, compiled regularly from information sent from every county to the state headquarters. Entitled Reports Relating to Murders and Outrages, its pages document what can only be described as the beginning of Georgia’s white terror.

Written in the elegant copperplate of the Victorian bureaucrat, the ledger sets out its accounts of ethnic assault and homicide under logical headings. There are columns for the ‘name of person assaulted or killed’; whether they were white or coloured; the ‘name or person killing or assaulting’, together with their race; whether anything was done to bring the perpetrators to justice; and any further ‘remarks’. In Columbus’s Muscogee County, and the five surrounding counties that today comprise the Chattahoochee judicial circuit, I counted the names of thirty-two victims attacked, most of them fatally, between March 1866 and November 1868. All but one were black. All the named perpetrators were white.

Even before the Civil War, writes W.J. Cash, the law and its institutions were weaker in the South, where slave-owners had displayed ‘an intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism’. In the turmoil of the Reconstruction era after the war’s end, these traditions found expression in a new wave of extralegal violence. ‘At the root of the post-war bloodshed was the refusal of most whites to accept the emancipated slaves’ quest for economic and political power,’ writes W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the historian of lynching in Georgia and Virginia. ‘Freed from the restraints of planter domination, the black man seemed to pose a new and greater threat to whites. During a period when blacks seemed to mock the social order and commonly understood rules of conduct, whites turned to violence to restore their supremacy.’