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

‘Bowers made his intentions plain to me personally. When we met up recently’. Pullen paused, then winked: ‘At an execution.’

An Alabama state trooper, so fat he seemed almost triangular, asked how lawyers got to be judges. Pullen chuckled. ‘You may rest assured that anyone successful in defence litigation need not apply. At least not on the Chattahoochee circuit.’

After the seminar, Pullen took me to dinner in a barbecue restaurant downtown. As we consumed a small pork mountain, I asked him about one of the cases that had attracted those letters from Holland and Wales, a capital murder he’d prosecuted in 1976. The defendant had been a mentally retarded man named Jerome Bowden, an African-American aged twenty-four. The body of his victim, Kay Stryker, a white woman of fifty-five, was found in her house, knifed and beaten, several days after her death. Afterwards, the police searched the home of her sixteen-year-old neighbour, Jamie Graves, and found an old pellet gun, its butt stained with her blood, together with her jewellery. Graves admitted burgling her home, but claimed she was killed by his friend Bowden. In return for his help, he was sentenced to life rather than being given the death penalty.

Bowden soon heard the police were looking for him. He walked up to a squad car he saw in the street, and asked if he could be of help. He was arrested on the spot, and less than two months after the murder, he stood trial. Pullen’s case rested on Bowden’s confession. He tried to retract it on the witness stand, saying he hadn’t been in Stryker’s house at all, and that a police detective had promised ‘to speak to the judge’ to save him from the electric chair in return for his signature. At the start of the hearing, Pullen had exercised his right to strike prospective jurors, so removing all eight African-Americans from the panel and ensuring that Bowden was tried only by whites. They did not believe him, and found him guilty on the second day of the trial.

In Georgia, as in many American states, capital trials consist of two phases. The first is the ‘guilt phase’, when the jurors have to decide guilt or innocence; in the event of a guilty verdict, they will go on to the ‘sentencing phase’, when it becomes their responsibility to decide whether a murderer should live or die. Here Bowden’s attorney, Samuel Oates, begged the jury not to impose the death penalty, arguing that his client was of low intelligence and had a ‘weak mind’.

Pullen dismissed this suggestion, arguing that it had been cooked up ‘so someone can jump up and say, “Poor old Jerome, once about ten years ago his momma told somebody he ought to see a psychiatrist.” He is not a dumb man, not an unlearned man … He certainly knows right from wrong.’ In his view, Bowden was ‘a defendant beyond rehabilitation’, for whom death was the only possible sentence, because he had been sent to prison – for burglary – before. He held up a photograph of Stryker’s body. ‘How do you take a three-time loser who would take a blunt instrument and beat a harmless fifty-five-year-old woman’s head into that? You can look through the holes and see the brains.’

In the nineteenth century, slavery’s apologists had justified human bondage by equating black people with animals. Appealing to the jury to decree the death of a mentally retarded teenager, Pullen invoked this tradition: ‘This defendant has shown himself by his actions to be no better than a wild beast – life imprisonment is not enough. Why? Because he has killed. Because he has tasted blood.’ It would take courage for the jury to vote to have Bowden put to death, Pullen averred; much more courage than giving him a life sentence. But ‘it took more courage to build this great nation, and it will take more courage to preserve it, from this man and his like’.

Almost ten years later, in June 1986, Bowden had lost his every appeal, and his last chance lay with Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Parole. However, evidence had now emerged that Pullen had overstated Bowden’s mental capabilities. In fact he had an IQ of fifty-nine, and was well within the clinical parameters of mental retardation.

Bowden’s pending execution became a cause célèbre. The international music stars Joan Baez, Peter Gabriel, Lou Reed and Bryan Adams signed a petition to stop the killing, and sang at a protest concert in Atlanta. A flurry of last-minute legal petitions bought a few days’ stay of execution, but on 23 June the Pardons and Parole board decided that he had indeed, in Pullen’s phrase, ‘known the difference from right and wrong’ at the time of Kay Stryker’s murder. The following morning, Bowden was led into the death chamber, his head and right leg shaved. The prison warden held out a microphone to carry his last words to an audience of lawyers, reporters and officials.

‘I am Jerome Bowden and I would like to say my execution is about to be carried out,’ he said. ‘I would like to thank the people of this institution. I hope that by my execution being carried out it will bring some light to this thing that is wrong.’ His meaning was ambiguous, but most observers thought he was referring to his own electrocution. Then he sat down in the electric chair. There was a short delay when the strap attaching a leather blind to hide his face from the audience snapped, and had to be replaced. But when the executioner threw the switch, the chair functioned smoothly. Eighteen months after Bowden’s death, the Georgia legislature passed a new statute barring state juries from sentencing the mentally retarded to death.

Pullen told me he still slept easy over Bowden’s execution. ‘I never heard Jerome Bowden was retarded until Joan Baez had a concert in Atlanta and said he was retarded. Jerome Bowden was no rocket scientist, but he knew words like “investigation” and “detective” and was kind of articulate. On death row, they said he was a deep thinker in Bible class. He was fit to execute.’

When we left the restaurant, it was already late. The cicadas were out in force, their strange chorus loud enough to overcome the noise of the distant traffic. We strolled back towards Pullen’s car, the shadows of the historic district’s houses shifting under a blurry moon. Not far from the Government Center, Pullen stopped.

‘This is the site of the old courthouse. This is where they seized a little black boy and took him up to Wynnton, right by where the library is now. He wasn’t more than twelve or thirteen and they shot him thirty times. The son of the man who led that mob grew up to become a judge. Kind of interesting, isn’t it?’

I left town next day intrigued but also bewildered, and with no real answers as to why Doug Pullen and his colleagues had such a passion for putting men to death. But notwithstanding Gray Conger’s protestations, I was beginning to suspect that if there was a place where the ‘amazing transformation’ in race relations that he claimed to have witnessed had been least effective, it was within the criminal justice system.

In police stations, prosecutors’ offices and the criminal courts, societies attempt to deal objectively with their most traumatic events. But the horrifying nature of those events sometimes makes objectivity impossible to achieve, and creates opportunities for ancient hatreds and primeval fears to reassert themselves. Stories about crimes and criminal trials, writes the British historian Victor Gatrell, permit ‘a quest for hidden truths, when obscure people have to articulate motives, interests, and buried values and assumptions … They expose fractured moments when people were in exceptional crisis, or observers were moved to exceptional passion.’ They may say more about the way societies function than any number of broader surveys.

Before I left Georgia on that first visit I drove out to DeKalb County, at the foot of Stone Mountain, the great, bald dome of granite where giant sculptures of Confederate leaders have been carved into the rock face. I was there to see Gary Parker, an African-American attorney and former state Senator who’d spent most of his career doing criminal defence work in Columbus. Parker, a tall, slim man of forty-six whose hazel eyes seemed to brim with energy, had fought some famous legal battles, both civil and criminal, against tough odds. ‘In Columbus,’ he said, ‘usually there’s only two blacks in the courtroom. Me and the defendant.’

We talked about the city and his work there long into the evening. I was about to leave when he took a pull on his menthol cigarette and paused, as if debating whether to say what was on his mind. Outside the windows of his spacious, homely den, thickets of trees cast dusky shadows. Recently, he told me, he had left Columbus for good, unable to bear an atmosphere that he had begun to find intolerably oppressive.

‘Sometimes I think something really bad happened in Columbus,’ he said quietly. ‘That there’s some terrible secret from the past. Like a massacre or something. I keep on expecting someone to go digging foundations at a construction site and find a mass grave. Raised as I was in the South, images of lynching come to mind all the time, and there have been times when I’ve sat in court there and felt as if I was witnessing a lynching in my lifetime. I don’t know what it was, but something happened there. It’s like a curse.’

I got up to go. I knew I had come nowhere near to understanding Columbus’s paradoxes and mysteries. I suspected that their solutions must lie deep in the city’s history, and in the way it had been remembered and set down, and had thus helped form contemporary outlooks and mentalities. I also knew I’d be back.

Most of the remains of antebellum Columbus are to be found in Wynnton, the neighbourhood Doug Pullen had mentioned at the end of our evening. It was once known as the ‘millionaires’ colony’, and its placid exclusivity dates back to the time when Columbus was first laid out in 1828, and its richer citizens began to construct their homes there, on the slopes of Wynn’s Hill, a safe distance from the downtown stews and factories springing up by the side of the Chattahoochee. They were joined by cotton planters from the surrounding countryside, who saw in Wynnton the ideal location for an urban retreat. Their Palladian temples and mansions decked with Louisiana-style wrought-iron tracery were once at the heart of a social whirl that is said to have rivalled more famous centres of Old South, slave-holding glamour, such as Charleston, Richmond and New Orleans. There were lavish picnics, barbecues, marching bands and orchestras, full-dress hunts and glittering balls.

As late as the 1970s, Wynnton remained a kind of Arcadia, writes the Columbus journalist and author William Winn. His nostalgic description carries more than a whiff of Gone with the Wind: ‘Nearly every house, however modest, has a lawn, and every spring Wynnton is ablaze with pink and white azaleas, the neighbourhood’s particular glory.’ Later, the district was to become synonymous not with colourful flowers, but with rape and murder. But until then ‘it had always been a calm, peaceful neighbourhood, almost entirely free of crime except for an occasional cat burglar. Generations of black nurses rolled perambulators containing generations of white children down the shady sidewalks, and every June the air became so redolent with the fragrance of magnolias and fading gardenias it almost made one dizzy.’

The economic strength of Columbus has long enabled it to wield disproportionate political influence in Georgia, and the torrid months that preceded the South’s secession from the United States were no exception. By 1859, just thirty-one years after the time when it lay on the ragged American frontier, the city is said to have contained eleven churches, four cotton factories, fourteen bars, forty-five grocery stores, four hotels, thirty-two lawyers, three daily newspapers and a magnetic telegraph office. Cotton spun in Columbus could be taken by paddle steamer down the Chattahoochee all the way to Apalachicola on the Florida Gulf Coast, a distance by river of almost five hundred miles. In May 1853, the closing of a last ten-mile gap saw the completion of the Muscogee-Southwestern railroad. ‘It was then that a great railroad jubilee was held in Columbus,’ writes the local historian Etta Blanchard Worsley. ‘Mayor J.L. Morton mingled water from the Atlantic Ocean with the waters of the Chattahoochee, typifying the union of Savannah and Columbus.’ In the whole of what was about to become the Confederate States of America, the industrial production of Columbus was second only to that of Richmond, Virginia.

In the 1860 census, the population of Muscogee County (including Columbus, its suburbs such as Wynnton and the surrounding rural districts) was made up of 9,143 whites, 165 free blacks and 7,921 slaves. It was on this human property that the city’s wealth depended, as its civic leaders recognised. As the abolitionist movement gathered strength in the North and Midwest, the lawyer Raphael J. Moses argued as early as 1849 in favour of leaving the Union in order to protect the right to own slaves. Five years later, America’s first secessionist journal, the Corner Stone, began publication in Columbus. Another early supporter of secession was the local attorney Henry Lewis Benning, later to become the Confederate General whose name is still borne by the military fort. In 1859 he warned that if Lincoln were elected President, all who resisted the end of slavery would be summarily hanged by the ‘Black Republican Party’. Immediate secession was the only way to escape the ‘horrors’ of abolition. ‘Why hesitate?’ Benning asked. ‘The question is between life and death.’

As the political temperature rose, individuals suspected of abolitionist sympathies faced violent retribution. In December 1859, William Scott, the representative of a New York textile company, was run out of Columbus by a vigilante committee, which claimed he displayed ‘more interest in the nigger question than in the real object of his visit’. Like the French aristocracy before the Revolution, Georgia’s whites had been seized by a grande peur. Their terror of a slave insurrection was fuelled by the distant memory of Nat Turner’s bloody revolt in Virginia in 1831, and the recent raid by the Christian radical John Brown on the federal armoury at Harpers Ferry in the same state, planned as a means of arming a putative slave rebellion. In the wake of the raid, which had been crushed by the future Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the 1859–60 session of the Georgia Assembly enacted harsh new measures against free blacks, who were seen as potential focuses for discord. Blacks from outside the state were forbidden to enter it on pain of being sold into slavery, and any current free black resident found ‘wandering or strolling about, or leading an immoral, profligate course of life’ could be charged with vagrancy and also sold. It was thenceforth forbidden for a master to free his slaves posthumously in his will, making slavery in Georgia somewhat less escapable than in ancient Rome.

From this febrile milieu sprang the Columbusite US Senator Alfred Iverson. ‘Slavery, it must and shall be preserved,’ he proclaimed in a speech in 1859, going on to argue that the only way to achieve this end was to form an independent confederacy. By the end of 1860, after Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election, the second Georgia Senator, Robert Toombs, who owned a plantation south of Columbus and later became the Confederacy’s Secretary of State, had also backed secession. On 23 December, the night South Carolina became the first state to leave the Union, Columbus celebrated with a torchlight procession, bonfires and fireworks. The city had already spawned several companies of a paramilitary ‘Southern Guard’, which joined the march in their freshly designed uniforms, rifles at their shoulders. J. Harris Chappell, aged eleven, a future President of Georgia College, wrote to his mother: ‘I think nearly all the people of Columbus is for secession as they are wearing the cockade. There are several small military companies one of which I belong to … the uniform is red coats and black pants. Lenard [sic] Jones is captain. I’m a private. Tommy’s first lieutenant. Sammy Fogle has got the measles.’

Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession passed the State Constitutional Convention on 21 January 1861, to be greeted in Columbus with a mass meeting of citizens, another torchlight procession, and the firing of cannon salutes. The common people shared the zeal of the small, slave-owning elite. The State Governor, Joe Brown, was warning them that if Lincoln were to free the slaves, blacks would compete for jobs with poor whites, ‘associate with them and their children as equals, be allowed to testify in court against them, sit on juries with them, march to the ballot box by their sides … and ask the hands of their children in marriage’. (Georgia’s laws against miscegenation were not struck down by the US Supreme Court until 1967.) In the first months of the war that began that April, Columbus sent eighteen companies to the front – 1,200 men, more than a fifth of its pre-war white population.

The war both blasted and, at least for a time, enriched Columbus. One family, that of the pioneering entrepreneur Colonel John Banks, whose seventh- and eighth-generation descendants were still occupying the magnificent Wynnton mansion known as The Cedars in 2006, lost three sons. As they fought what increasing numbers came to perceive as a ‘rich man’s war’, ordinary Confederate soldiers not only died in combat, but fell prey in vast numbers to malnourishment, cold and disease. N.L. Atkinson, who lived on the Alabama side of the Chattahoochee, wrote in a letter to his wife, ‘this inhuman war is putting our whole country in mourning’. But while its youth fought and fell at Gettysburg, Antietam and Manassas, Columbus’s industry boomed. By 1862, the Eagle textile mill was running non-stop, and producing two thousand yards of worsted for uniforms each day, as well as cotton cloth for tents, thread, rope and rubberised fabric. The city’s ironworks rapidly expanded, to become the Confederacy’s second-largest source of swords, pistols, bayonets, artillery pieces, steam engines, boilers and ammunition. The newly established Confederate Navy Yard made a gunboat 250 feet in length.

Of the industrial quarter that was the scene of this feverish activity, not a trace remains. As the war reached its closing stages, the Union’s Major General James Harrison Wilson was ordered to sap the Confederacy’s resistance by striking at its last centres of manufacturing. Having dealt with the cities of Selma and Montgomery in Alabama, his force of thirteen thousand reached the west bank of the Chattahoochee on 16 April 1865 – a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. Neither Wilson nor the ragtag of militia units defending Columbus had received this news; they were likewise unaware that Lincoln had been murdered on 14 April. After a short battle on the Alabama shore, the Yankees swarmed across the Fourteenth Street bridge and took the city that Wilson had called ‘the door to Georgia’ in just over an hour. Next day, Wilson ordered that ‘everything within reach that could be made useful for the continuance of the rebellion’ must be destroyed. Mills, foundries, warehouses and military stockpiles were put to the torch, together with three gunboats, which drifted for miles down the river in flames. While the Union army went about its work, civilian mobs looted stores and small businesses. Even respectable, well-dressed women were said by one witness to have participated: ‘They frantically join and jostle in the chaos, and seem crazy for plunder.’ As Wilson moved on towards Macon on 18 April, leaving only a small garrison, Columbus was ‘a mass of flame and coals’.

For many years, Columbus’s business and political elites have gently looked down on their counterparts in the parvenu state capital to the north, Atlanta, which was still a featureless rural tract when Columbus was building its grid of downtown streets. Perhaps their superior attitude stems in part from their ancestors’ differing response to Yankee-inflicted devastation. While Atlanta complained about its treatment at the hands of General William Tecumseh Sherman during his notorious march to the sea, Columbus got on with building new factories. Most of the imposing red-brick buildings downtown date from the late 1860s and seventies. One of them is built on the site of its predecessor, the Eagle mill. Above its mullioned arches, a banner in brickwork picks out the legend ‘Eagle and Phenix’. Within a month of Wilson’s fire, the iron foundries were open again for business. Louis Halman, formerly the proprietor of a sword works, retooled his charred and shattered premises and began, symbolically enough, to manufacture ploughs.

Impressive as this physical rebuilding was, in the period after the South’s defeat, Columbus also engaged in a process of psychic reconstruction. In common with other communities whose long-term material suffering was much more severe, an important part of the city’s attempt to come to terms with its role in America’s bloodiest war was its adoption of a narrative myth – the legend of the Lost Cause. On the one hand, this was a way of making the past seem acceptable. At the same time, it contained the ideological seeds for the region’s defining social characteristic far into the twentieth century – white supremacy.

There is a line in William Faulkner’s play Requiem for a Nun which has become a cliché in writing about the South: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Faulkner meant it to apply to the enduring consequences of an individual’s actions, not the influence of history – and in any case, the past affects the present in regions other than the states of the former Confederacy. But ultimately the past doesn’t die because it is remembered, and memory, as historians have recently begun to understand, is a potent influence on contemporary events, an analysis that seems especially true of the American Civil War. ‘Americans have needed deflections from the deeper meanings of the Civil War. It haunts us still; we feel it, but often do not face it,’ writes the Amherst professor David Blight. Instead of a titanic struggle over principle, America preferred to remember the war through ‘pathos and the endearing mutuality of sacrifice among soldiers’, so that ‘romance triumphed over reality’. The consequence, Blight concludes, has been ‘the denigration of black dignity and the attempted erasure of emancipation from the national narrative’.

In the Lost Cause account of the Civil War, partially created and vividly expressed in Columbus, slavery, racial oppression and the struggle against them have all but disappeared. The Confederate soldiers’ courage and independence were to be celebrated, but not the realities of the ‘peculiar institution’ – slavery – they had happened to be defending. If slavery were to be mentioned at all, it was to be as something decent and necessary, grounded in mutual respect.

Histories of Columbus by authors from the city are steeped in the different aspects of this myth. For Nancy Telfair, a local journalist whose History of Columbus, Georgia was published in 1928 and recently reissued, the only principles involved in secession and the war were ‘states’ rights’ to determine whether or not to permit slavery, and the prerogative of owners ‘to assert their rights to equality and the protection of their property’. It simply did not occur to her that the fact that this property happened to consist of human beings made it different from bales of cotton or farmland. According to Telfair (her real name was Louise Jones DuBose), slavery was merely ‘a characteristically Southern industry’ destroyed by the war.

Etta Blanchard Worsley’s Columbus on the Chattahoochee was published in 1951, at an early stage of the modern civil rights era, when Georgia’s African-Americans were fighting in court for the right to vote and other basic liberties. Like Telfair’s, her book was published by the Columbus Supply Company, and taught in the city’s schools. Both works can still be found on the shelves of Columbus’s libraries. The Reverend Joseph Wilson, father of the US President Woodrow Wilson, had argued that bondage was an ‘ameliorative’ institution, which could improve the spiritual welfare of slaveholders and slaves alike. Echoing his logic, Worsley characterises slavery as ‘part of the evolutionary process of the civilisation of the African tribes’. There might, she adds, have been isolated examples of abuse by ‘low-class overseers’. In general, however, ‘there had been the kindliest feelings between the whites and the Negroes … the tie that bound the slave to the master with whom he was closely associated was one less of law than of mutual need, confidence and respect’. As for abolition, it was but a ‘fanatical demand’ orchestrated mainly by Northern Quakers, peddled by means of ‘inflaming editorials’, and ‘little did it help for the South to plead for conciliation. The agitation went on for forty years.’