by Bill James
Fourth, I think that the crimes were his way of proving to himself that he was smarter than other people. This allegation—the criminal thought he was smarter than everybody else—is a policeman’s trope; it is something that police and prosecutors say in every case, whether there is any evidence that it is true or not, and many times I think that it is nonsense, but I do believe it is true in this case. He had been put down, all of his life—denied credit, denied opportunity, denied the good things in life; this is how he saw the world, and there was truth in it. He was an intelligent man, and I believe that this was his way of showing himself that he was smarter than others, that he could commit these crimes and no one could catch him.
Fifth, the possession of dead bodies became a major motivator for him. He loved to have possession of a body of a dead young girl, of course, but this element went beyond that. We have seen many, many stories in this book in which bodies were moved after death—bodies stacked on top of one another, persons killed in one room (leaving huge bloodstains) but their bodies found in another, bodies posed, babies killed in one bed and placed in another after death, persons killed outside and their bodies inside for no sensible or coherent reason. He loved to possess dead bodies. He loved to touch them and pick them up and move them around.
And finally, committing these crimes became his self-identity. It was who he was; it was how he thought about himself. He was the man with the secret that nobody could ever get to. You guys look at me and you see nothing—this is how he thought; you see a small and dirty man who doesn’t amount to anything, but I know that I can do things and I have done things that you cannot imagine. I am the very Monster of whom you live in terror—and you have no idea that it is Me. He was a tiny man who cast a huge and terrible shadow, and he knew that, and in his mind he was the size of his shadow.
CHAPTER XXXIII
The Crimes of 1908
Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hart lived in Frazier, Georgia. You can find Frazier on a map, but it’s not easy. Frazier is not a place on the map, it is a point on the map. Frazier is eight-tenths of a mile north of Empire on the Macon & Brunswick Railroad Line. Empire itself is an unincorporated settlement of around three hundred people, about three miles south of Cochrane, which is a legitimate small town. Why Georgia felt that it needed three little towns in three miles I have no idea; it seems rather unusual. I suspect that Frazier may not have been a settlement but merely a rural railroad stop.
Anyway, Mr. and Mrs. Hart were murdered with an axe on March 4, 1908; you have probably guessed that by now, it is getting rather late in the book to surprise you with these things. The murder of the Harts is a low-information event; in fact, the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Hart seem to have made the newspapers at all only because, in the manner of the South a hundred years ago, two black men were lynched and set on fire to expiate the crimes. Perhaps the easiest way to tell this story is to start with a verbatim account of the crime from a contemporary newspaper:
Lynch Two Negroes
Confess the Foul Crime
For Purpose of Robbery, Blacks Armed with Axes Brutally Slew White Couple
HAWKINSVILLE, GA—March 6. Two negroes, Curry Roberts and John Henry, were lynched near here today and their bodies burned. They were accused of the murder of Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hart. One of the negroes confessed to the crime and said the motive was robbery. Roberts and Henry were arrested Wednesday, following the discovery of the body of Warren Hart. The body of his wife was lying nearby in a dying condition. The murder took place at Frazier, near the Hart home. Mr. Hart died as a result of a blow on the head, apparently from an ax. Mrs. Hart was seriously beaten and was found unconscious. She died Wednesday without having regained consciousness. Today the negroes confessed their guilt, were taken from the county jail and carried some distance from town and hanged to a tree. The lynching party consisted of a number of men who concealed their identity with masks.
After the hanging the bodies were cut down and incinerated. There is no excitement in the county as the result of the hanging.
The crime for which the negroes were hanged was committed just at daylight Wednesday, when someone attacked Hart just as he left the house to feed his stock. The murderers went into the house and attacked Mrs. Hart with the ax, leaving her for dead. The purpose of the assault is believed to have been robbery. The murderers did not get any money, although the Harts are known to have about $1,000 in the house.
News of the murders spread rapidly throughout the section and in the village of Empire, near the scene of the murder, there was most intense excitement. Over 1,000 persons gathered, among them many friends of the aged couple, who formed a posse, procured dogs and began a search. Within a short time the two negroes were arrested and brought here for safe keeping. During the night a mob gathered near the jail, demanded Roberts and Henry, and then took them to an isolated place near the scene of the horrible murder, and lynched them.
Mr. and Mrs. Hart were 65 years old.
—Abilene Daily Reporter, March 7, 1908
This article is reprinted here exactly as it first appeared, complete with odd use of prepositions, the variant spelling of “axe,” and the stunning lack of irony in reporting that the Negroes were taken to Hawkinsville “for safe keeping.” The only thing we changed was that this particular article (in the original) referred to Curry Roberts as “Cherry” Roberts. Every newspaper article about this crime that we could find contains the same general information as this one except for the Curry/Cherry thing. We think “Curry” was more likely the name.
The two authors of this book disagree as to the likelihood that this crime was a part of the series. Rachel points out:
1. The Man from the Train never attacked anyone at dawn.
2. He rarely attacked anyone who was awake.
3. There are no children among the victims.
4. We lack sufficient information about the crime to include it on the list.
Also, at least one of the lynching victims “confessed” to the crime, although obviously under great duress, and neither of us places any weight on this alleged confession. Lynch mobs almost always say that their victim confessed; it keeps at bay the nasty questions about the actual guilt of those who are lynched.
The other side of the argument is:
1. Multiple people were murdered.
2. With an axe.
3. In the very heart of The Man from the Train’s favorite killing zone, near the Florida/Georgia border.
It is clear from the reports that the Harts were bludgeoned with the axe, and we can lose track of how unusual this is on its own terms; people murdered with an axe are normally struck with the cutting edge of the axe. Almost the only thing we can tell about the location of the house is that it must have been virtually on top of the railroad track, since “Frazier” existed only as a railroad stop, and not as a population center.
The Man from the Train never attacked anyone at dawn, true, but I don’t see how the report of the attack happening at dawn can be anything other than supposition, since obviously the murderer(s) had departed well before the crime was discovered on the morning of March 4. It must be that Mr. Hart was found dressed, and, we might assume, Mrs. Hart in her nightclothes. Nothing is reported to the effect that she was fixing breakfast when attacked or anything like that. It seems equally plausible to me that The Man from the Train may have been lurking outside the house about midnight when, for example, a dog may have begun to bark ferociously, or some other noise may have alerted Mr. Hart. Mr. Hart may have pulled on his clothes to go investigate, and may have been attacked as soon as he was outside the door.
A course of justice which ends in two executions within twenty-four hours of the crime is, it seems to us, much more likely to identify the wrong men than to identify the right ones. The “culprits” were seized without the help of such niceties as judges, hearings, or even the police or the sheriff. A mob formed, and they got some bloodhounds, the bloodhounds led them for a mile or two until they came across a
couple of black men, and one of the black men was terrorized into a confession, or maybe he didn’t confess; maybe that was just what his murderers said to make the narrative fit. Were they found with blood on their clothes? Were they found in possession of incriminating items? Did they leave visible tracks at the scene?
No mention of that. We are not impressed either by the bloodhounds or the alleged confession. The “confession” says that it was a robbery, but every newspaper account says that the Harts had $1,000 in the house, and that the robbers did not get the money. So it’s not a robbery; the robbery, again, is merely supposition and narrative. It’s a non-robbery, a crime without apparent motive, like almost all the others in this series.
This is all we really know about this crime: that four people died, not two, that the story came and went in twenty-four hours, and that the story was over before the system of justice could pull its boots on.
* * *
Two railroad lines met in Watauga, Texas, and still do today. Watauga is nine miles north and slightly east of Fort Worth, north and west of Dallas. The Texas and Pacific Railroad was built through Watauga in 1876 and 1877, heading south to Fort Worth, putting what had been a settlement of a dozen or fewer people on the map. 1876 was the cattle drive era; the trains were built to (and did) replace the cattle drives, providing a more efficient way to get the cows to market. The people of Watauga wanted a railroad depot, to make the trains stop there, so they offered to rename the town “Edwards,” after a railroad foreman named Edwards; the railroad built the depot but then kept using the name “Watauga,” which was a Cherokee word meaning “village of many springs.” In the 1880s Jay Gould’s KATY railroad—the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas—built another line that crossed the Texas and Pacific Railroad at the south edge of Watauga, headed into Dallas.
The population of Watauga in 1908 appears to have been between seventy and a hundred people, although there are no published census figures. The number one nonfarm industry in the Dallas/Fort Worth area in 1910 was—again, this may not come as a surprise to you—logging.
Like a man named Longmeyer, whose house was broken into in chapter XIII of this book, M. F. Gerrell was a foreman on the KATY railroad. His wife was named Dora. A wire service story dated April 13, 1908, reports that “the people of the village of Watauga . . . are much agitated by the discovery this morning of the bodies of the entire Gerrell family.” Note the words that are used: the entire Gerrell family, the husband, wife, and a baby girl, and also the discovery this morning. Other newspaper stories . . . well, one other newspaper story . . . will say that it is not the entire family, and this is a significant issue. Since this was Texas and not Georgia, the murders were immediately blamed not on “Negroes,” but on “Mexicans,” although the San Antonio Light opined on the day of the murders that “the crime is believed to have been committed by negroes for the purpose of robbery or by some members of Gerrell’s gang of 35 Mexicans.” So it could have been the blacks or the Mexicans; it is so hard to tell which it was when there is no evidence against either one.
April 13 was a Monday morning, April 12 a Sunday night, so we now have five ticks suggesting the possibility that this was a related case: the motiveless murder of a peaceful family (1) in a small, unincorporated settlement (2) where two railroad lines crossed (3) in a logging area (4) on a Sunday night (5). The murders were committed between midnight and 1:00 a.m., so there’s six.
But how do we know it was that time of the night? Another newspaper report says that there were two other children in the house who were sleeping in an adjoining room. In that report, the children heard the baby crying a little before 1:00 a.m., went to investigate, and found two men with clubs murdering their parents. Also, that report says that Mr. Gerrell was both stabbed and beaten.
So here we have two significant discrepancies from the pattern: (1) that the murder weapon may have been a club, and (2) that what appears to be the best and most specific report of the crime says that there were multiple assailants.
It’s a little hard to figure, isn’t it? If two adult men armed with clubs and knives are in the process of beating people to death and are interrupted by two small children, would you expect the murderers to flee the scene? Also, how is it that the murders were not discovered until morning, if the criminals were interrupted in flagrante at 1:00 a.m.? (By the way, the term in flagrante delicto originally meant “caught committing a crime,” or “caught blazing.” The use of the term to indicate sexual misconduct is a colloquial derivative, and not the original meaning of the phrase.)
At this point, rabbit trails abound. Did The Man from the Train meet up with a partner, while he was in prison, and did the two of them work together for a while after he got out of prison? For that matter, how do we know that there weren’t two men doing this all along; how do we know that The Man from the Train wasn’t The Men from the Train?
We don’t know, for sure—but it is one newspaper report that says that there were two men involved in Watauga, and newspapers in this era are not so reliable that it would seem to me wise to chase the rabbit any farther.
* * *
Woodland Mills, Alabama, has every possible characteristic of the place The Man from the Train would probably go next, except the most important one. Northeastern Alabama has what could be called mountains or large hills, and the railroads prefer flatlands. The closest the railroad came to Woodland Mills was over by Hobbs Island, which is about ten miles east of Woodland Mills, but in effect farther than that, because the Tennessee River curls between the two, and you have to go about three miles out of your way to find a bridge.
We believe that it is unlikely that the Woodland Mills murders were committed by The Man from the Train; unlikely, but we cannot be certain. Tom Edmondson and his family lived in a log house, a log cabin, in rural Morgan County, Alabama, about twenty miles south of Huntsville. November 26, 1908, was Thanksgiving Day. On November 25, the Edmondson family was murdered, and their house and barn were set on fire. There were six victims: Edmondson, his wife, his mother, and three children.
All the first reports say three children. Later, months after the crime, all of the newspaper reports say two children, so . . . figure that one out. We believe there were three children. The fire consumed the house, leaving little in terms of recognizable remains. Searchers found the remains of five victims, but there were six people unaccounted for. A grand jury or a coroner’s jury was impaneled, and the following week, the grand jury returned an indictment against Tom Edmondson. Their conclusion was that he had murdered his family, burned his house, and fled the area.
Edmondson had a white tenant farmer named Bob Clements; Clements rented a house and land on Edmondson’s property. Clements moved out of that house some weeks after the murders, and a family named Luker moved in. The story I am about to tell you is illogical. People often do illogical things, and we cannot conclude that this didn’t really happen because it is so illogical, but this is such a feast of illogical behavior that scratching one’s head seems hardly sufficient. In late January 1909, Mr. Luker confronted Clements, claiming that he had found partially burned bloody rags in the fireplace, the remnants of a bloody shirt and bloody overalls. Clements threatened to kill Luker if he told anyone about finding the bloody clothing, and Clements was arrested for threatening to kill Luker.
Do you spot a couple of problems here? First, why would you move out of a rental house, in the wake of six murders, and leave partially burned bloody clothing in the fireplace? The fact that you put the bloody clothing in the fireplace clearly means that you recognize that this is damaging evidence—yet you leave the bloody clothing partially burned in the fireplace, and walk out the front door?
And second, if you are the new tenant, and you find the partially burned bloody clothing in the fireplace, why do you tell the previous tenant about that, rather than the sheriff? Hey, Bob, I think you may have murdered the Edmondson family; let’s talk about it? Apparently Luker felt comfortable going to the sherif
f, because as soon as Clements threatened him, he went to the sheriff and had Clements arrested, but what exactly was the point of talking to Clements about it in the first place?
In any case, when Clements was arrested, his wife immediately burst into tears, and assumed (incorrectly) that he was being arrested for the Edmondson murders, and she then told what came to be accepted as the true story of the Edmondson murders. Clements was involved with Edmondson’s wife. On the day of the murders Clements was talking with Edmondson’s wife in the barn, or perhaps they were interrupted in flagrante, when Edmondson found them and confronted them. Clements killed Edmondson, and then killed the rest of the family to cover up the crime. He had returned to the Edmondson house the next day, according to his wife, to set fire to the house and barn.
There is no evidence less reliable than the allegations of an angry spouse. The story told by Mrs. Clements seemed like it might be true, however, and Clements was arrested, tried, and convicted of the murders.
Actually, he was convicted of only one of the murders, the murder of a daughter named Nettie. He was held on warrants charging him with involvement in all six murders—including that of Tom Edmondson, whose body was never found and who had himself been indicted for the murders—but was prosecuted for only one of the murders as a hedge against the prohibition of double jeopardy, a common practice in this era.