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

The details of these forgotten killings were not always recorded, although some bring to mind the later, more famous wave of lynching that swept the South from the 1880s on. One example took place in Harris County, just to the north of Columbus, now the site of rich dormitory suburbs, where the body of Jordan Nelson was found in June 1866, ‘in the woods, hanging by the neck’. But from the beginning, many such murders seem to have displayed a degree of organisation, a coordinated premeditation that revealed their underlying purpose. The Ku Klux Klan did not spread to Georgia from its home state of Tennessee until 1868. But the racist vigilantism that the Klan embodied was already in evidence when the Freedmen’s Bureau ledger opened its record in March 1866. On the fifteenth day of the month, an African-American named only as Samuel was ‘shot in bed by party of white men, organized’ in Talbotton, east of Columbus. His unknown killers, says the Freedmen’s Bureau ledger, called themselves ‘regulators’.

The bare accounts contained in the ledger also convey what must have been a terrifying sense of randomness, an absence of motive other than race which must, all too rationally, have led any black person to feel they were at risk. In Harris County in August 1866, an unnamed black woman ‘was beaten by a white man by the name of Spicy. She died next day, and he escaped.’ ‘There was no cause for the assault,’ the ledger states of the shooting of K. Hocut by Nathaniel Fuller in Muscogee County on 20 January 1868. Of the slaying of Samuel Clemins in Harris County by ‘unknown whites’ on 7 September 1868, it records: ‘Clemins was murdered by four white men because he had sent his son away to avoid a whipping.’ Hiram McFir died in the same county at the hands of Bud Vines five days later. ‘Vines shot McFir while holding his horse,’ says the ledger, ‘without the least cause.’ As for Tom Joiner, he was stabbed by Jesse Bennett in Troup County on 17 September ‘for refusing to let his dog fight’.

The national politics of the late 1860s were dominated by the struggle over ‘radical Reconstruction’, the attempt by the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, to persuade the former slave states to ratify new amendments to the Constitution – the Fifteenth, enshrining black citizens’ right to vote, and the Fourteenth, which promises ‘equal protection under the laws’. In and around Columbus, the absence of such protection was manifest. According to the ledger, only one of the perpetrators in the region’s thirty-two listed attacks was convicted and sentenced in court, a man named John Simpson, who killed Sammy Sapp in Muscogee County on 27 November 1867. Simpson, however, who was ‘tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang’, was ‘coloured’. Where white perpetrators were concerned, the outcomes of the cases described in the preceding paragraph typify the rest. K. Hocut’s killer, Nathaniel Fuller, was at least tried, but was acquitted. Although an inquest was held into the murder of Samuel Clemins, ‘no further action was taken by the civil authority’. Likewise, ‘the authorities have taken no action’ against Bud Vines, the man who shot Hiram McFir, and Vines ‘is supposed to be in Alabama’. The Freedmen’s Bureau officer who recorded the stabbing of Tom Joiner by Jesse Bennett knew that Bennett ‘lives near LaGrange’, but in his case too, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authorities’.

One of the most odious aspects to the ethnic terror of the 1860s was the maiming and murder of African-Americans by the same individuals who had once owned them as property, and who seemed unable to adjust to the fact that if they still wished to put their former slaves to work, they would have to pay them. The first such case recorded in the ledger dates from July 1866, when an unnamed coloured man from Talbotton was ‘shot by his employer’. When Andrew Rawick stabbed John Brown in Troup County on 3 July 1868, ‘the difficulty originated about some work’, and when Austin and Dennis Hawley were ‘severely cut with [a] knife’ in Harris County two months later, it was because ‘the Hawleys demanded a settlement for work [they had] done’. In the same county on 20 October, Isaac Smith was killed by three unknown white men because he had ‘left a [work] place in the spring’.

Two brothers from Harris County, William and Lewis Grady, appear to have taken special pains to exact vengeance from their former human property. On 4 August 1868 they ‘whipped very severely’ a man named David Grady; the fact that he shared their last name suggests that he had been their slave. The reason, states the ledger, was that ‘David had left [their] place because he did not get enough to eat.’ In this case, warrants were issued for William and Lewis Grady to attend court, but they did not answer them. A month later they again revealed their contempt for the law when they ‘shot and very severely whipped’ another African-American who bore their name, George Grady. As usual, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authority’. When the ledger closed at the end of 1868, the Grady brothers were still living with impunity a few miles north of Columbus in Harris County, Georgia.

A pattern that would last many decades was beginning: racial violence and inequalities were simply matters beyond the rule of law. Long after the end of the 1860s, the fact that the law did not treat the races equally was among the first lessons black parents taught their children.

‘Sassing,’ said Gene Hewell, ‘you know what that means? To be rude, disrespectful. Our parents warned us about sassing from the cradle up. That didn’t just mean being careful what you said. It meant, you don’t mess with white people; you don’t talk to them, and you don’t talk back. If they do something you don’t like, you get out of their way. You could be walking down Broadway and if three white people came towards you, you got off the kerb. And if you didn’t, they could make it real ugly for you – arrest you, beat your brains out in jail.’

In 1950, Gene said, a favourite uncle, ‘a big, muscular guy’, was murdered after getting into some kind of trouble with a white grocer – ‘They said he’d sassed him.’ After his death, his body was laid across the railroad tracks, and ‘cut up and pushed in pieces along the bridge towards Phenix City’.

This climate of fear and vulnerability allowed other kinds of oppression and exploitation to flourish.

‘We’d come out of slavery, but we had to find a place to stay, and they owned the houses. You had to buy clothes, and they owned the stores. You had just about enough chump change to feed your children and go back to work each Monday. If you didn’t like your job, you couldn’t quit at one place and find work at another. That was blue-collar slavery.’

The story of Gene’s own liberation, of how he came to buy his own downtown store and made it succeed, was a long saga of struggle against prejudice and hostility, against banks which refused to lend him money, and a Police Department that twice tried to ruin him by laying bogus charges – once for theft, and on another occasion for possessing planted drugs.

For a few months before and after the end of 1977, at the time of the stocking stranglings, he’d employed a man named Carlton Gary, first as a sales assistant, and then as a TV advertisement model. ‘It was the Superfly era when clothes were flamboyant. Big boots, tassels, silk shirts and hats,’ Hewell said. ‘I used Carlton for the simple reason that he looked good. Real good. He was a very well built, extraordinarily attractive man, and he knew how to move, you know what I’m saying? He was a charmer, and when it came to women, he had the pick of the litter.’

‘How often did you show your adverts?’ I asked.

‘At busy times, like the weeks before Christmas, Carlton would have been appearing in five TV spots a night. I guess that made him kind of easy to recognise.’ Nine years after working for Hewell, Gary would find himself standing trial for the Columbus stocking stranglings.

The rapes and murders of Florence Scheible and Martha Thurmond in October 1977, followed by Carl Cannon’s exposure of the CPD’s incompetence, plunged Columbus into a new abyss of fear. More than two decades later, in his chambers in the Government Center tower, I met Andrew Prather, a State Court judge who had lived alone in Wynnton at the time of the murders. Despite the belief that the killer was black, he said, any single man was regarded as a possible suspect: ‘There was a police car parked outside and I knew they were watching me. I thought of moving to Atlanta but then I thought, “What if I leave town and the killings stop?”’

One night he found an old lady’s dog in the street. ‘I was scared to give it back. I thought I was going to get shot. I yelled through the door, “It’s Andy Prather! I live down the street and I’ve got your puppy!”’ His fears were well founded. In one reported incident, a woman fired a pistol through her glass front door when she saw the shadow of a friend and neighbour who was calling to check her well-being.

As the police stumbled to make progress, they asked for help from the famous FBI criminal psychology profile expert, Robert K. Ressler. In his memoirs, Ressler writes of attending a social gathering during his visit: ‘A group of middle-aged and elderly women were at a party together, and the main topic of conversation was the mysterious series of killings. At one point in the evening, in a demonstration of how completely the fear of the killer had gripped the city, seven of the women guests emptied their purses, revealing seven handguns that fell out on to the carpet.’ Meanwhile, the local media advised single and widowed women to move in with male relatives, and if that were not possible, to form ‘communes’ for their own protection.

Aware that he and his colleagues had no suspect, Detective Richard Smith and his partner, Frank Simon, decided to try prevention. Before the murders began, Smith had been responsible for a programme designed to protect store-owners from robbery – the Columbus Anti-Robbery Enforcement System, or CARES. Possible targets were identified, and then equipped with panic button hotlines to the police, who were supposed to respond immediately.

‘Now,’ said Smith in his New York office, gazing into the middle distance through a mist over Central Park, ‘I had to profile the elderly women and widows who lived alone in Wynnton, then go to them and tell them, as if they didn’t already know, that they were likely victims of the strangler. The harder task was to convince them that they were going to be safe, that we were going to protect them. They didn’t have family, so we were it.’

Smith fitted dozens of these possible victims’ homes with alarms activated by panic buttons and pressure 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.

For the first time, the city’s continuing terror was mingled with anger. At a disastrous press conference, Mayor Mickle insisted the police were doing all they could to solve the killings – just as he had already done time and again, the Ledger pointed out, since Ferne Jackson’s death the previous September. ‘We are going to solve this problem,’ Mickle said. ‘We are going to make arrests.’ Next day, the paper published a lengthy attack on Mickle, the CPD and its chief Curtis McClung, in the form of a letter from one E. Jensen:

We the people of Columbus, Georgia are sick! We have a terminal disease called fear, and soon, it will be the death of us all. But the trouble is, it’s justified. My fear stems not so much from the criminal element, but … the ineptness of local law. We are now on centre stage. The world is watching us through the networks. And what do we do? We let the world see our sloppy police work and our praying Mayor! Mickle, get up off your knees and do something!

Stung by the criticism, the CPD tried to mount its own public relations campaign, briefing reporters about the long hours its staff were working and their total commitment to finding the killer. At the behest of Georgia’s Governor, the police were forced to cede their autonomy and set up a joint ‘task force’ with the state-wide detective agency, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Twenty GBI agents and support staff moved into a special office that took up the entire basement of the Government Center, bringing with them Columbus’s first crime computer system. Ronnie Jones, the CPD’s chief homicide detective, told reporters that task force members were making huge personal sacrifices; for his own part, he said he was working up to twenty hours each day, while the strangler had invaded his dreams. For the first time in eight years, Jones revealed, he had gone so far as to disappoint his wife by cancelling their annual wedding anniversary holiday in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

If shared mentalities are partly formed by shared historical memories, among the white citizens, cops and politicians who strove to deal with the stranglings, there was none more potent than the Reconstruction period. Accounts of this era, after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in the local histories of Columbus describe it in extravagant language, suggesting that until the stranglings, Reconstruction had been the city’s deepest wound. They are, of course, written from a white perspective. On the violence and death meted out to African-Americans, the Columbus histories are silent. In their pages, post-war lawlessness and injustice in the South involved whites only as victims.

Like the Lost Cause legend, this narrative, with its wayward, marauding Negroes, ‘carpet bagger’ Northern radicals and ‘scalawag’ Southern collaborators, is not unique to Columbus. For decades, the myth of punitive vengeance by the Civil War’s victors dominated American historiography, even in the North. Its acceptance helped to legitimise the white supremacist oppression of the Jim Crow era, and was further fuelled by works such as Thomas Dixon’s bestselling 1905 novel, The Clansman. Dixon characterised Reconstruction’s aim of achieving legal equality as ‘an atrocity too monstrous for belief’, using the language of visceral racial hatred. Underlying it was the familiar Southern rape complex. In Dixon’s view, the decision to award the vote to the ‘thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour’, had rendered every Southern woman at risk of barbaric violation.

In 1914, D.W. Griffith made cinematic history with his film based on Dixon’s book, The Birth of a Nation. Screened at the White House for Woodrow Wilson and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Edward D White, it depicted a version of Reconstruction that bore only the most distant relationship to the truth. A contemporary scene-by-scene review in Variety provides a representative taste: ‘Soon the newfound freedom of the former slaves leads to rude insolence. Black militiamen take over the streets in a reign of terror. Flashes are shown of helpless white virgins being whisked indoors by lusty black bucks. At a carpetbaggers’ rally, wildly animated blacks carry placards proclaiming EQUAL RIGHTS, EQUAL MARRIAGE.’

Much of the film concerns the efforts of Gus, one such ‘buck’, to defile the innocence of the virginal ‘Little Sister’. Terrified, she tries to flee the pursuing Gus, while the orchestra (in the words of a later critic) ‘plays hootchy-kootchy music with driving tom-tom beats, suggesting … the image of a black penis driving into the vagina of a white virgin’. Just as he is about to catch her, she opts for the preferable fate of tumbling over the edge of a cliff. Needless to say, her death is avenged by the heroic redeemers of the Ku Klux Klan, who lynch Gus against a superimposed image of Little Sister in her coffin. At the film’s climax, a massed Klan cavalry ‘pour over the screen like an Anglo-Saxon Niagara’, to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.

Across the South, writes the Klan’s historian Wyn Craig Wade, The Birth of a Nation was greeted as a ‘sacred epic’, while the film ‘united white Americans in a vast national drama, convincing them of a past that had never been’. No moving picture had ever achieved a fraction of its audience and impact before. Against this backdrop, Columbus’s parochial, local version of the Reconstruction story is not particularly original, and is somewhat less vivid. But for future race relations in the city, it lacks neither relevance nor power. In paragraphs representative of prevailing white sentiment, Nancy Telfair begins the pertinent chapter of her 1928 History of Columbus, Georgia with a ringing condemnation of the South’s treatment in the immediate wake of defeat in 1865: