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

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 (#ulink_4ea2e0cb-e547-5b28-a027-5faac3af0fde)

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)* (#litres_trial_promo)

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.’

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.