by John Hersey
The Police Department took up Lawanda Schettler’s story with high hopes. Somewhere they dug up a rumor that “a contract had been out for the life of Carl Cooper,” who, according to one report, had knocked over a dope pad and had stolen drugs and jewelry. Detroit sleuths, I was told by Assistant Prosecutor James Garber, were dispatched all the way to New Jersey, Minnesota, and Louisiana, in attempts to run down leads on the story told by the lady who was out during Warrant Officer Thomas’s war looking for a bottle of beer. “All of which,” Prosecutor Garber told me, “came to a blah ending.”
4. I Was Going to Get Railroaded
Up to this time and for the next few days, the finger remained very much on Warrant Officer Thomas in spite of the two confessions—and perhaps even partly because of them, in the sense that the Police Department would understandably have liked the onus for the Algiers mess to be at least shared with another service, the National Guard. This urge for Togetherness was similar to the gallantry with which each of three services gave credit to others for first entry into the annex during the assault on the building. On this occasion, Robert Greene’s accusations against Warrant Officer Thomas gave apparent substance to the desire for common cause. By the same token, Thomas’s wish was very strong indeed that the Police Department alone would be willing to take the blame; yet he also wanted to be fair and loyal to fellow men-in-whatever-uniform, and not be a tattletale. The conflicts in him were so unsettling as almost to transform him—had not the issues been so deadly—into a comic figure.
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In the conspiracy hearing, Attorney Kohl illuminated by a line of questioning Mr. Thomas’s agony of those first days after the Greene accusations.
Q. Going back to the events in question, do you recall being interrogated yourself on a number of occasions because of the contention that an unidentified warrant officer had allegedly killed one or more people at the Motel?
A. Yes, sir, that was in the paper. . . .
Q. All right. And this inquiry shortly was directed in your direction, towards you, wasn’t it?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. And after which time there was substantial, considerable interrogation of you by various authorities?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. This was true not only locally but on a Federal level?
A. Yes, sir. . . .
Q. Do you know how many statements have been taken from you?
A. Not offhand. I mean, there was quite a few of them, I know. There was one to my counsel. There was two to the FBI. There was two to the Police Department. One was to Officer Casey and one was to Schlachter. I have been questioned several times by these people.
THE COURT: By whom?
A. By these people. The FBI—
THE COURT: Oh.
A. —and the Homicide. Also during the lie-detector test there was a lot of questions asked there. Every once in a while somebody would call up a question and call me. It was several times, I mean, ten, fifteen times.
Q. And did the time come when you were asked if you would testify against any of the Defendants here involved today, Detroit Police Officers?
A. That was confusing. . . .
Q. Were you advised that they were considering pressing charges against you? Were you advised of that?
A. I was advised that they were trying to pin the two murders on me. In fact, when I talked to Mr. Kaier of the FBI, I was pretty well shook, because I was under the impression that they were trying to hang these murders on me.
Q. That was just about what he told you, wasn’t it?
A. I asked him—I figured I was going to get railroaded. I figured I had had it, and I asked him how many years do you get for each murder.
Q. And it was after that that there was further discussions and you were asked to testify against the Police Officers here?
A. I was confused on this. This, to me, is very distasteful.
Q. Yes.
A. Because these people—you got to take into consideration I called these people. I mean, we worked together out there on the riot and it is hard, because you hate to see anybody lose their job, maybe even have a jail sentence out of something like this. I have very little taste for this, but anyway—
Q. Well, did there come a time when you were told, “Well, we are not going to press charges against you, but we want you to testify”?
A. I will be honest with you; I don’t know who I was a witness for on the first deal up until the day I was brought into Court. I didn’t know I was for, for sure, whether I was for the Prosecutor or the defense. . . .
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Thomas was asked by the Detroit detectives to take a lie-detector test, and he did. “I could hear the needle, you know,” he told Ladd Neuman. “And out of the side of my eye, I thought I could see it move. I couldn’t see them, of course. They were watching through a two-way mirror or something. Boy, there was one question! They asked me if I’d had a shotgun any time that day. I know that damned needle pegged when he asked it. And I even remarked about it. But I guess it’s the way you recover.”
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On Tuesday, Thomas and Wayne Henson were called in for a show-up of Detroit police officers, and Thomas took the precaution of getting his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Howard Dryden, to accompany them. Colonel Dryden did not have the spirit of Togetherness. He thought that his men were treated in a hostile manner by the detectives, and that Thomas was rushed through the line much too fast. “They took us through in about thirty-three seconds!” he told Neuman. He threatened to leave, taking his troops with him; then they did pull out. All three went back the next afternoon for a repeat performance, with guarantees that the procedure would be more dignified.
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From the police summary:
“On August 1, 1967, at 6:20 PM, Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas viewed police officers and identified PATROLMAN DAVID SENAK as one who did the beating of the persons in the line-up.
“On August 1, 1967, at 6:25 PM, Pfc. Wayne Henson viewed police officers and identified PATROLMAN DAVID SENAK as the officer who questioned the people in the line-up in the lobby of the Manor House.
“On August 2, 1967, at 2:50 PM, Warrant Officer Theodore Thomas viewed police officers and identified PATROLMAN RONALD AUGUST as the officer who shot a man, and also identified PATROLMAN DAVID SENAK as the officer who did the questioning and the beating.”
5. One Half-Solved and One Unsolved
On August 2, Detective Schlachter requested from Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan warrants for the arrests of Ronald August for the murder of Auburey Pollard and of Robert Paille for the murder of Fred Temple.
Of the three murders, one was half-solved and another was unsolved.
The Pollard case seemed fairly clear-cut; Pollard had been killed by one man at the climax of the killing game, and August, after looking at photographs of the victims, had said he was that man; Thomas, who had witnessed the killing, had also identified August as the killer. That case was solved.
As to the killing of Carl Cooper, there were no leads but Lawanda Schettler’s beery tale. The weight of the evidence, as time passed, indicated that Cooper had run downstairs from A-14 with an apparent intent of escaping through the back door and had run into the first officers to enter the building—but who had they been?
When had the death of Fred Temple taken place? Had he been killed without ever leaving room A-3 and without ever having been on the line in the hallway, as the testimony of Thomas and state troopers who said they had seen his body in that room some time before the end of the game would urge; or was he killed last, as the testimony of Temple’s best friends, Roderick Davis and Larry Reed, who kept insisting that they had seen him on the line in the hall at the very end, asking permission to go back and get his shoes, would argue? Those who gave the former testimony would have had a motive of trying to prove that Temple’s death had taken place before their entry into the building or after their departure from it.
There ar
e some hints that Thomas and some of the state troopers may have seen more than their sworn testimony would suggest they saw; that Thomas may have been in the building earlier and some of the state troopers longer than their testimony made it appear. These hints further suggest that the second body they said they saw may have been Pollard’s rather than Temple’s.
Here are two such hints:
In his report Trooper P. A. Martin, describing Carl Cooper’s body, as if at the time of the troopers’ entry into the building, wrote, “Lying beside his left hand was a knife, commonly known by this officer as a Toad Stabber.” But Juli Hysell told Stephen Schlesinger, a Harvard law student who was gathering material for an article, “I saw one of the policemen place a knife next to Carl Cooper’s body—the same one which had been used to threaten Clark.” If Juli was telling the truth, and if her observation was correct, the knife did not appear beside Cooper’s body until after part of the game had been played; some troopers may have witnessed the second killing, or at least been present in the annex when it took place.
By his own account Thomas did witness one of the killings—that of Auburey Pollard, at the climax of the game. In the Dismukes trial, Prosecutor Weiswasser gave Thomas a scare by asking him if he had not, in his telephone call to Sergeant-Major Kazup at the command center, said he had reason to think a policeman had murdered a prisoner. (Kazup, in a statement to the police, had reported, “Thomas said he realized a police officer had murdered a prisoner,” and that this was a “bad business.”) “I did make that statement,” Thomas admitted. But in all his testimony to that point, Thomas had tried to make it seem that his call to Colonel Dryden and Kazup had taken place before he had entered the annex. After this, one had to conclude either that Thomas had called after he had been in the building or that some state troopers had witnessed a murder and told him about it.
It is hard for me to believe that Fred Temple’s two close friends could have been mistaken about seeing him in the line at the end. It could be suggested that they were lying—that they had seen their friend shot early in the incident and that they had agreed upon a fabrication in terror of the consequences of telling the truth; but in view of the willingness, and even determination, of all the black witnesses to take risks in their testimony on the Algiers case, this possibility seems remote to me. At the very least, there was some fishiness about the chronologies offered by Thomas and the troopers.
An easily solved problem: Whose word would be worth more, in the long run, to a white judge and a white jury in a court of law? That of uniformed white men, or that of black youths hanging around a place like the Algiers Motel and of a white girl who would consort with such as they?
6. No Pistol Was Found
Prosecutor Cahalan, knowing that David Senak had been implicated in one of the killings by Paille’s confession, had no corroborating evidence. He did know that Senak had helped to kill Joseph Chandler as he vaulted over a back-yard fence on the second day of the disturbance; and now another report was in, describing another killing by Senak on the Friday of the riot:
“At 10:45 p.m., Fri., July 28, 1967, Scout 13-5 (a 5-man car) received a radio run to 570 E. Kirby, ‘man with a gun.’ . . .
“From the investigation and interviews, it appears that PALMER GRAY, Jr., the deceased, had gone to 570 E. Kirby, Apt. #2, where he became involved in an argument over money with his father, PALMER GRAY, Sr. They went outside and tussled, and the deceased became enraged and threw bricks and rocks through the windows of Apartment #2. The deceased then left and returned later, armed with a small cal. black gun and threatened to kill everyone there. ELLEN GREYS called the police and the deceased left the apartment.
“The officers arrived at the scene and were told what had happened and went to 5341 St. Antoine, where PATROLMAN SENAK and Patrolmen Carroll and Alcorn went to the rear of the building. While they were in the alley, Patrolman Evans, who was in the front of the building, saw a Negro male, later identified as PALMER GRAY, Jr., armed with a rifle, run across St. Antoine. Patr. Evans yelled this information to the officers, and Patrolmen Carroll and Alcorn ran toward Kirby to intercept this man. PATROLMAN SENAK ran in an alleyway between the buildings, and as he reached the sidewalk at St. Antoine, he saw PALMER GRAY, Jr., on the sidewalk in front of 5341 St. Antoine with a rifle in his hands.
“The deceased pointed the rifle at PATROLMAN SENAK, and the officer ordered him to drop the rifle, which he did. The deceased then whirled and ran up the stairs at 5341 St. Antoine, ignoring the officer’s orders to halt. PATROLMAN SENAK then fired one shot from his revolver (a Smith & Wesson 6-shot .41 Cal. Magnum Revolver, Serial #69073, personally owned and Department-approved) into the wall as the deceased turned the corner on the stairway.
“The deceased ran to the top of the stairs on the 3rd floor, with PATROLMAN SENAK in pursuit. At this time, PATROLMAN SENAK ordered the deceased to raise his hands. Instead, the deceased ran back down the stairs toward the officer and reached into his pocket as if to draw a gun. The officer, being previously apprised by witnesses at 570 E. Kirby that the man had threatened them with a small dark-colored hand gun, feared the deceased was about to draw his gun, and fired one shot from his revolver, fatally wounding the deceased as described. No hand gun or other weapon was found on the deceased’s person or in the immediate area at this time.”
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Prosecutor Cahalan, who ruled Gray’s death not to have been riot-connected, now knew that of 4,400 policemen who had been out during the uprising in which there had been forty-three riot-connected deaths and this other one, a single policeman had had a hand in two killings, had been implicated in a third, and had been in the near presence of two others.
7. One Night in Jail
On July 7, August and Paille were arraigned.
“They held us,” Paille, who in his time on the force had taken a good number of citizens to jail, told me, “for one night in the county prison. It was the most awkward night of my life. During that time there, I tell you, it really was something. We were confined to an area there, isolated, and—we were both together—and jeez, it was, you know, it was almost unbreathable in that place, it was all closed and no windows or anything. It was hot in there, it was in the summertime, you see, and all night there you couldn’t sleep, because, you know, it was just a bumpy little old mattress and everything else there, you know. I had to kind of position myself in one position there, if I’d rolled over either way I’d have fallen on the floor, and in the middle of the night, they had some guy out there, he was mopping the floors there, and I put a hanger against the door just in case somebody came along and tried to steal my wallet, which I had on my person, and he knocked the hanger over there, and he turned the light on, so right away I saw who he was, and he just left. But it seemed that all night there everybody was flushing the toilet all at one time, you know. And it was, you know, unbearably hot and everything else there, and just the thought of being in prison, all closed off from the world and everything else there. Unbearable!
“They held us for one night in the jail, and then the next day we went back to court, and they had looked into their logs and so forth there and found that on previous occasions they had released prisoners for this charge, murder, that they had us on at the time, and then they released us from that day on, on a bond, five-thousand-dollar bond, two sureties.”
31
FIRST MAN IN COURT
1. Alacrity
Actually the first man to have been brought to the threshold of punishment was Melvin Dismukes, the Negro private guard.
On Sunday evening, July 30, a show-up was staged at police headquarters, at which Sortor, Michael, Clara Gilmore, and two others viewed a number of black men, including the four private guards who had been at the Algiers on the night of the incident. Sortor identified Dismukes “as the person who beat him and others while lined up in the lobby of the Manor House”; and Michael picked Dismukes out, too.
Attorney Nicholas Smith, who took Dismukes’s c
ase because he was counsel for St. John’s Episcopal Church, of which Dismukes’s father was sexton, objected later to the treatment Dismukes received at the hands of the police on the evening of the show-up. Dismukes, according to Smith, had gone in voluntarily to see what help he could be and heard himself being told to fall in for a show-up. Smith was not present; Dismukes was told he was being represented by a lawyer named Seymore Posner, a member of the so-called Clinton Street Bar, which consists of hangers-around who seek appointments from judges. Smith based his objection on a Supreme Court decision in 1966, in Wade vs. California, in which the Court ruled that a show-up is a critical part of a proceeding and that denial of counsel at a show-up is a denial of due process; Smith argued that Dismukes was, in effect, denied his own counsel.
After the show-up, the police took Dismukes to the Fifteenth Precinct lock-up and held him for the night. Learning of this the next morning, Smith requested that Dismukes be brought at once to Recorder’s Court, and Smith went there and waited all morning for his appearance. It was almost noon before Dismukes was brought in, saying that he had been told by detectives in the meantime that his attorney had granted permission for his subjection to a polygraph test; he had submitted to it. Smith, while acknowledging that, if asked, he would have given permission for a lie-detector test, said that whoever told Dismukes that the permission had been obtained simply lied.