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

The most detailed contemporary account of what happened next was written up in a dispatch for the New York Tribune on 1 April by the Reverend John H. Caldwell, the presiding Elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in LaGrange, forty miles to the north. Caldwell was a leading ‘Christian scalawag’, an early white prophet of racial tolerance who worked hard after the war to create a bi-racial church in Georgia. He had even organised special religious camps for freedmen in LaGrange, attended by up to six thousand former slaves. A frequent visitor to Columbus, he was present in the city during the events he described.

A political as well as a religious scalawag, Caldwell addressed a mass meeting of Republicans in the courthouse square on the afternoon of Saturday, 29 March. He pieced together his account of what happened after the meeting by talking with members of the Columbus coroner’s jury:

Between twelve and one o’clock last night a crowd of persons, estimated at from thirty to forty in number, went to the house where Mr Ashburn lodged, surrounded the building, broke open the rear and front doors, and murdered him in his room. He received three fatal shots, one in the head between the eyes, one just below and to the rear of the hip, and another one in the mouth, which ranged upward. His clothing had from ten to fourteen bullet holes in them [sic]. Five persons entered his room and did the murderous deed; the rest were in other parts of the house and yard. The crowd remained from ten to fifteen minutes, during which time no policeman made his appearance. As the murderous crew were dispersing, however, some policemen made their appearance on the opposite side of the street. They could give no account of the affair when examined. This deed was perpetrated on one of the principal streets, in the most public part of the city … all the assassins wore masks, and were well-dressed.

Ashburn’s body was barely cold before those who thought his murder justified began to assail his memory. The Sun’s report the following day was the beginning of a series of claims that would be made in many subsequent accounts, none of which, according to Caldwell, was true. Far from being a cold-blooded political assassination by the Klan or its supporters, the paper said, Ashburn’s murder owed its origins to his own tempestuous nature, and to his habit of waging disputes with members of his own party.

Caldwell protested in his dispatch for the Tribune that the claim that Ashburn’s friends were to blame for his murder was merely an attempt ‘to cover up and confuse the whole affair … everyone in Columbus knows for what purpose these vile insinuations are put out. See how The Sun abuses and traduces the character of poor Ashburn, even while his mangled corpse lies before the very eyes of the editor. Ye people of America, do ye not understand all this?’ In Caldwell’s view, the Sun’s pro-Klan coverage before the killing suggested that its editor ‘knew beforehand what was going to happen’. Now, he went on, Columbus’s advocates of racial equality were overcome with understandable terror. ‘The sudden, horrible, cowardly and brutal murder of Colonel Ashburn, by this infamous band, shows that their purpose is murder. They are bent on midnight assassinations of the darkest, bloodiest and most diabolical character. Union men all over the city now feel that their lives are at every moment in danger. They do not know at what hour of the night they may be massacred in their bed.’

Few other white people saw things quite that way. The Ashburn murder is a perfect example of what the contemporary historian of Southern violence W. Fitzhugh Brundage terms ‘flashpoints of contested memory’, events whose competing accounts have as much to do with ‘power, authority, cultural norms and social interaction as with the act of conserving and recalling information’. In Ashburn’s case, old Dixie, the Klan and the Democrats were soon trouncing their opponents in the propaganda battle. By the time the Congressional Committee heard testimony in the summer and autumn of 1871, Ashburn’s characterisation as an evil-doer largely responsible for his own, richly merited, demise was much more advanced. Some of the witnesses took their cue from Radical Rule, a virulently hostile pamphlet that is thought to have been written by William Chipley, one of the men accused of murdering Ashburn. Its claims and phraseology surfaced repeatedly in their evidence. According to Radical Rule, Ashburn had been remarkable as an overseer ‘only for his cruelty to the slaves’. None other than Henry Lewis Benning, the Columbus attorney and former Confederate General, told the committee that Ashburn ‘was reputed to be a very severe overseer – brutal’. Benning admitted he had never met Ashburn, but happily added further slanders. Again, the influence of Radical Rule, which claimed that Ashburn died ‘in a negro brothel of the lowest order’, is clear. Benning told the committee: ‘After the war was over he joined in with the freedmen, and made himself their especial friend – he was ahead of almost every other white man in showing devotion to their interests. He quit his wife and took up with a negro woman in Columbus, lived with her as his wife (so said reputation) and at a public house at that; I mean a house of prostitution.’

Hannah Flournoy, the black woman who owned Ashburn’s last residence, and who witnessed his murder, also testified. After the shooting, she said, ‘They run me out of Columbus.’ Too frightened to return, she ‘lost everything I had there’. Shortly before Ashburn’s death, she added, she had been given a letter addressed to Ashburn. He opened it in her presence, so that she could see it was ‘a letter by the Ku Klux, with his coffin all drawed on it’.

Trying to rescue Ashburn’s reputation for posterity, Caldwell told the committee that he had known Ashburn for years before the war, ‘and I never heard anything against him’. Far from having been a cruel slave overseer, ‘He was a very clever, kind man, and I never heard anything against him personally.’ In Caldwell’s view, Ashburn fell ‘a martyr to liberty’, having been ‘among the very few men in Georgia who openly resisted the secession mania all through the war’. The experience of serving in the Georgia Convention had tempered his radical views, and he had done his utmost to negotiate political compromise ‘in a subdued and conciliatory spirit to the moment of his death’. Other independent witnesses supported his account.

Caldwell’s efforts were to no avail. In the Columbus histories by Telfair and Worsley, it is the Ashburn depicted in Radical Rule, the divisive, adulterous, former ‘brutal overseer’, whose death is memorialised, not the principled would-be statesman. As late as 1975, in an article on the case for the Georgia Historical Quarterly, Elizabeth Otto Daniell cites the pamphlet produced by Ashburn’s enemies as her source for the statement that he had once been a ‘cruel overseer of slaves’.

Historical events do not become flashpoints of contested memory without good reasons. One of the explanations for the posthumous vilification of G.W. Ashburn is the political struggle of which his murder formed a significant part: the largely successful terrorist campaign to limit or remove the rights of Georgia’s African-Americans. This ‘required’ their most important white Columbus advocate to be demonised, and at the same time to be seen as having acted over many years against their real interests. In Telfair’s phrase, the purpose of Ashburn’s assassination was ‘merely to remove a public menace’. Generations after his death, the guardians of white Southern memory found that the bleakest assessments of his life and character still fitted with their overall view of Reconstruction as a time of Northern cruelty and injustice.

Behind Ashburn’s death was also another agenda, which concerned the matter of his killers. His murder was a scandal of national significance, and the ensuing investigation and eventual trial were widely reported. General William Meade, the former federal commander at Gettysburg who was now in charge of Georgia’s military occupation, appointed two famous detectives to bring the assassins to justice – H.C. Whitley, who had investigated the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, and William Reed, a veteran of the failed impeachment of Lincoln’s far from radical successor, President Andrew Johnson. During the spring of 1868 they arrested at least twenty-two persons, most of them whites from Columbus, who were said to be men of the utmost respectability. Twelve were eventually charged with the murder, and their trial began at the McPherson barracks in Atlanta on 29 June – not by an ordinary civilian court, but by a military commission, a panel of federal military officers, because Georgia had not yet been readmitted to the Union.

According to contemporary reports in Northern newspapers, the prosecution presented a formidable case. The Cincinnati paper the Commercial claimed, ‘The testimony of the prosecution was crushing – overwhelming, and the cross examination, in the hands of eight illustrations of the Georgia bar … did not in the least damage it.’ The only evidence presented by the defence had been alibis which did not stand scrutiny.

However, by the time this assessment was published at the beginning of August, it was too late. The defendants’ guilt or innocence was no longer at issue. That spring, elections had been held for a new Georgia Assembly, which until now had resisted the Fourteenth ‘equal rights’ Amendment, so prolonging the military occupation. On 21 July, its Democrat diehards abruptly changed their minds and ratified the amendment. The fate of Ashburn’s alleged killers had been settled by an extraordinary deal between Southern white leaders and the federal government, in which the prisoners’ freedom, as Worsley puts it, was ‘Georgia’s reward’. On 24 July, General Meade issued orders to dissolve the military commission. Next morning, the prisoners returned to Columbus, to be met at the railroad station by a large, exultant crowd. In theory they had been released on bail, pending future prosecution by the restored civilian authorities. In practice, there would be no further effort to put them or anyone else on trial.

For the former defendants’ many Southern supporters, it was not enough that they were free: they had to be seen as utterly innocent, as almost-martyred victims of their enemies’ radical zeal. Hence, at one level, the need for the claim that Ashburn might have been killed by African-Americans or white members of his own party: if the Columbus prisoners were innocent, there had to be alternative suspects. Meanwhile, there was another battle for future historical memory to be fought. Upon their release, nine of the prisoners issued a statement, printed next day by the Columbus Sun. It said that the prosecution witnesses had been suborned by ‘torture, bribery and threats’, including the use of the ‘sweatbox’. Meanwhile, the defendants had been held at Fort Pulaski in conditions of inhuman cruelty:

The cells were dark, dangerous, without ventilation, and but four feet by seven. No bed or blankets were furnished. The rations consisted of a slice of pork fat [original italics] three times each week. A piece of bread for each meal, soup for dinner and coffee for breakfast, finished the bill of fare. An old oyster can was given each prisoner, and in this vessel both coffee and soup were served … Refused all communication with their friends, relatives or counsel, they were forced to live in these horrid cells night and day, prostrated by heat, and maddened by myriads of mosquitoes. The calls of nature were attended to in a bucket which was removed but once in twenty-four hours.

In some quarters the prisoners’ allegations were vehemently denied. According to the Cincinnati Commercial, their supporters in Georgia were guilty of ‘moral terrorism’, which ‘made it a crime to entertain any opinion but the one most decided as to the[ir] innocence’. Appalled by the claims of torture and ill-treatment, General Meade issued his own public rebuttal, accusing the Georgia newspapers of making false and exaggerated statements for political purposes, and insisting that they had ‘no foundation’. He ended his remarks with some trenchant comments about the city where Ashburn died: ‘Had the civil authorities acted in good faith and with energy, and made any attempt to ferret out the guilty – or had the people of Columbus evinced or felt any horror of the crime or cooperated in any way in detecting its perpetrators, much that was seemingly harsh and arbitrary might have, and would have been, avoided.’

There were two further layers of significance to the murder of George Ashburn. In a case of the highest importance and profile, positions had been taken not in response to evidence, but on the basis of partisan beliefs and allegiance. And at its end, resolution had not come about through a court’s dispassionate verdict, but through a political deal, itself the result of the vexed and edgy relationship between the Union and the states of the South. Not for the last time in Columbus, the rule of law had been shown to be a contingent, relative concept. Realpolitik had taken precedence over justice.

Even in Georgia, cloudless nights in January bring frosts, and bands of mist that collect in hollows, clinging to the trees. The cold muffles sound. As I walked amid the lanes and shrubbery of Wynnton one evening at the start of 2001, I found it easy to imagine how an intruder might have crept undetected between the pools of shadow, moving in on human prey without so much as the crackle of a twig. Twenty-four years earlier, in the weeks after Kathleen Woodruff’s death, the Columbus police stepped up their patrols again, joined by their many allies. By January 1978, some of the task force officers were giving in to despair, and hinted to reporters that they were beginning to think that the stocking strangler possessed supernatural powers. Trying to catch him, they suggested, was like trying to hunt ‘a will o’the wisp, a ghost’.

If science couldn’t stop the killer, the authorities hoped to rely on sheer numbers. Earnestine Flowers, a childhood friend of Carlton Gary, was working as a Sheriff’s Deputy. ‘There were guys from the hills of Tennessee who knew how to track people; Military Police from Fort Benning; the Ku Klux Klan; people from other Police Departments who wanted to volunteer. We had night lights, people hiding up in trees; that new night vision thing which had just come out; dogs. And yet we were getting so many calls. People were so afraid. I don’t mean only the people who lived there. I was terrified, too. I was out on patrol, shaking with fear. I remember thinking, “I can’t do this, night after night; I gotta get myself assigned as a radio operator. I gotta get myself inside the building!”’

If there was a point when Columbus became immobilised by fear, it came with what law enforcement staff still call the ‘night of the terrors’ – the early hours of 11 February 1978. It began with an attempted burglary at the Wynnton residence of a retired industrial magnate, Abraham Illges. An imposing building, a pastiche of a medieval castle, the Illges house had a drive that opened on to Forest Avenue, in the heart of the territory haunted by the strangler. On 1 January the house had been burgled, and while Mr and Mrs Illges slept, a purse containing her car keys removed from the bed next to hers. Next morning, her Cadillac was missing. The couple then installed a sophisticated alarm system, with a pressure pad under the carpet near the front door, and at 5.15 a.m. on 11 February, someone stepped on it, automatically summoning the police. They arrived within a few minutes, and, in the belief that the burglar might be the strangler, summoned help. As officers, some with sniffer dogs, fanned out through the moonlit trees and gardens, the airwaves were alive with officers’ communications.

Half an hour after the alarm had been raised at the Illges residence, a second, home-made panic buzzer sounded two blocks away on Carter Avenue, inside the bedroom where Fred Burdette, a physician, lay sleeping. His neighbour, Ruth Schwob, a widow of seventy-four who lived alone, had asked him to install an alarm in her own bedroom, wired through to his, so that he might summon help if she were attacked. When the alarm went, Burdette tried to call Mrs Schwob, and listened as her telephone rang without answer. Then, while his wife phoned the police, Burdettte ran to his neighbour’s home. By the time he reached her door, the occupants of several squad cars were already approaching the premises. The first officer to reach Mrs Schwob, Sergeant Richard Gaines, later described what he saw:

I climbed in through the kitchen window, over the kitchen counter, had my flashlight. I started going through the house room by room, without turning on any lights, using only my flashlight. And after about two minutes, I got to the back of the house and looked in through the bedroom door and saw Mrs Schwob, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had a stocking wrapped around her neck; it was hanging down between her legs, also laying on the floor was a screwdriver. Then I went over to where she was and when she saw me she said, ‘I thought you were him coming back.’ And then she said, ‘He’s still here, he’s still in the house.’ And I went over and I checked the necklace – I mean the strangling – the stocking that was wrapped around her neck to make sure it was not too tight, and it was loose.

Gaines and his colleagues checked the rest of the house. But Mrs Schwob was mistaken. The stocking strangler had gone.

The Columbus newspapers published next day, 12 February, warmly celebrated Mrs Schwob’s survival. Like Kathleen Woodruff, she was a very prominent citizen and patron of the arts. For twenty years after the death of her husband, Simon, in 1954, she had continued to run his textile firm, Schwob Manufacturing, and continued as board chairman emeritus until it was sold in 1976. In 1966 she was Columbus’s Woman of the Year, and her other accolades included the local Sertoma Service to Mankind Award. She was, reported the Ledger, ‘credited with almost single-handedly raising more than $500,000 for the $1.5 million fine arts building at Columbus College’, which was named after her husband.

Ruth Schwob, the Ledger said, had survived the attack because she was a regular jogger and unusually fit for her age.

I just awakened and he was there. He was on the bed and had his hand on my throat and wrapped pantyhose all the way around. Then he pulled the thing tightly round my neck. He had a mask on his face, I think he had gloves on, and it was dark in my room. There was no flesh showing, and he never uttered a sound. It was quite a struggle. I fought like a tiger. He choked me so bad, I passed out. I think the police just missed him. I don’t know how long he was in the house or whether he was gone before the police arrived.

After her rescue, the police sealed off the surrounding streets as officers combed the earth for a scent with bloodhounds and a helicopter equipped with floodlights hovered overhead. There were shoe tracks leading from Schwob’s kitchen window, where the strangler had forced his entry with the screwdriver found by her bed. But once again, he escaped. ‘If he doesn’t have knowledge of the area,’ the task force leader Ronnie Jones told the Ledger, ‘then he’s mighty damn lucky.’

Having found Mrs schwob, and having failed to find the strangler, Jones and his staff assumed that he had left the area. In fact, he merely fled two blocks to 1612 Forest Avenue, a house diagonally opposite the Illges castle. It was not until 11.30 in the morning of the following day, 12 February, that Judith Borom called on her way to church to check on the woman who lived there, her mother-in-law Mildred, a lone widow, aged seventy-eight. Earlier that day Judith’s husband, Perry Borom, had been discussing Mildred’s safety with his business partner, George C. Woodruff Junior, Kathleen Woodruff’s son. ‘I was telling him, “I’m really worried about your mama,”’ Woodruff told reporters later. ‘He said he’d sent a man out to put screws in the window to keep it closed.’

Judith was with her three children. She parked her car in the back yard, and rang the back doorbell. There was no answer, but she could hear the television playing. She told her son to go round to the front while she tried to peer into Mildred’s bedroom, at the building’s side. Then she heard the boy screaming: ‘Mama, come here, Mama, come here.’ At the front of the house a plate-glass window had been broken, and the front door was ajar, wedged open with a piece of carpet. Judith called the police. Mildred’s body, raped and strangled with cord from a Venetian blind, was lying on the hall floor. The autopsy reports suggested that she was being murdered at the very time that dozens of police were keeping busy at Ruth Schwob’s house two blocks away, and the bloodhounds and helicopter were conducting their futile search of the neighbourhood.

As usual, the task-force leader Ronnie Jones was among the first on the scene. At the sight of the killer’s sixth victim, he collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Ronald had begun to take it personally,’ Detective Luther Miller, who now took over his responsibilities, later recalled. ‘He felt like it was his responsibility to stop the strangler. He had – we had all been working day and night to protect these women. He started thinking it was his fault each time one was found dead. It was just an emotional breakdown. Chief McClung decided he needed a break.’

The CPD’s relationship with Columbus’s eccentric coroner, Donald Kilgore, remained somewhat strained. On the day after Mildred Borom’s killing, it took another turn for the worse. Fibres found on her body, Kilgore told reporters, were ‘black, Negroid, pubic hairs’. Kilgore, it will be recalled, was a mortician, without scientific training. At the time he made this controversial pronouncement, proper forensic examination of the corpse and the crime scene had barely begun. Presumably, Kilgore had noticed that the hairs were dark and curly.

Four days after the discovery of Mildred Borom’s body, the Columbus police turned for help to the realm of the spirits. At the behest of Detective Commander Herman Boone, two officers took John G. Argeris, a well-known psychic who was said to have helped police solve crimes in New England, on a drive through Wynnton. Argeris, the officers’ report stated, ‘determined that the suspect lives in the area … The suspect was also determined, without a doubt, to be a white male, with large eyes, having a full beard. Suspect either has money or his family is considered well-to-do. Argeris determined that the suspect has the initial “J” … Argeris further stated that “J” should stand for John.’

The pressure on the cops was already almost intolerable, but on 1 March it grew still more severe. Police Chief McClung received a letter, signed ‘Chairman, Forces of Evil’, purportedly a white vigilante group, saying that if the strangler were not caught before the beginning of June, a black woman named Gail Jackson, whom the group had already kidnapped, would be murdered. If the strangler were still at large in September, the letter went on, ‘the victims will double … Don’t think we are bluffing.’ Gail Jackson, it rapidly became apparent, was indeed missing.

With commendable sang froid, McClung separated the ‘Forces of Evil’ investigation from the stranglings case. Eventually, after the receipt of further letters that demanded a $10,000 ransom, the FBI’s psychological profilers suggested that the author of the letters was black, and that Gail Jackson was probably already dead. They were right on both counts. The ‘chairman’ of ‘Forces of Evil’ was an African-American soldier from Fort Benning named William Henry Hance, and he had killed Jackson and two other women. Towards the end of 1978 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Twelve years later he died in Georgia’s electric chair.

Perhaps the night of the terrors scared even the strangler. For his last murder, he moved out of Wynnton, to Steam Mill Road, a mile and a half away. There, on 20 April 1978, eight months after his first attack, he killed Janet Cofer, aged sixty-one, a teacher at an elementary school. Her son, who normally lodged with her, had been away for the evening. And then, without apparent explanation, the stocking stranglings stopped.

FOUR Dragnet (#ulink_995eecf5-aa6c-5976-afa0-513d82b956a4)

The first time I met the blues mama,

They came walking through the woods

The first time I met the blues baby,

They came walking through the woods

They stopped by at my house first mama,

And done me all the harm they could.

The blues got at me

Lord they ran me from tree to tree

The blues got at me

Lord they ran me from tree to tree

You shoulda heard me beggin’,

’Mister blues, don’t murder me.’

‘The First Time I Met the Blues’,

’LITTLE BROTHER’ MONTGOMERY (1906–85)