Grievances

by Mark Ethridge

  Saturday, both Bullock and I showed up to nurse the story through the copy desk. By the end of the day, only one question had surfaced. We had written that Hirtsboro was one hundred and eighty miles south of Charlotte. The copy desk atlas said it was one hundred and sixty-five.

  “Where’d we get one eighty?” I asked Bullock.

  “My expense reports. Go with one hundred sixty-five.”

  At dinnertime Walker checked in with Carmela just to make sure the latest dust-up in Uruguay hadn’t bumped us off the top spot on the front page.

  At 10:00 p.m. precisely, Bullock and I took the stairwell to the bottom of the building and slipped into the pressroom where a low rumble was becoming a roar as the huge Goss offsets spooled up to full speed, thickening the air with a fine mist of black ink droplets.

  Copy after copy of the next day’s first edition flew through rollers and a web of folders and emerged at the end of a line in a stack. Even from twenty-five feet away, I saw the Wallace Sampson story with a sixty point headline splashed across the top of the front page.

  A blue-suited member of the press crew spotted us, pulled two copies from the stack, gave us a big grin and a thumbs-up.

  “Thanks,” I mouthed.

  Bullock and I walked together to the parking lot carrying our hot-off-the-press copies. It seemed like such a strange way for it to end. The moment for which we had worked so hard and so long and there was no one around with whom to share it. Bullock dodged me when I tried to give him a hug. He saluted instead.

  I thrashed in bed that night too exhausted to think clearly, too excited to sleep. I mentally reviewed every paragraph of the story and re-examined the evidence we’d amassed to back it up. I thought of all the things that could go wrong. I imagined all the possible outcomes.

  I was still awake at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning when I heard the thud of the Sunday Charlotte Times on my doorstep. I went to the door, got the paper, saw the headline, saw our story, fixed myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to read.

  Three Named in Unsolved Killing of 13-Year-Old

  By Matt Harper and Ronald L. Bullock

  Charlotte Times Staff Writers

  Hirtsboro, S.C.—For more than 20 years, the killing of 13-year-old Wallace Sampson during civil rights unrest in this small Savannah River town has gone uninvestigated, unsolved and unpunished.

  But after a three-month inquiry, the Charlotte Times has located two men who say they and a third person were involved in the killing. The three are:

  • O. P. Pennegar Sr., the sole Hirtsboro town policeman at the time of the shooting who has since retired.

  • William Bascom, a Ku Klux Klan member who became an informer for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED).

  • J. Rutledge Buchan, the magistrate at the time of the killing and now in Hirtsboro, a town of three thousand people 165 miles south of Charlotte.

  Pennegar and Bascom have confirmed their role in the killing to reporters for the Times. Both said independently that Buchan was also involved.

  To date, the Times has been unable to determine which of the three fired the fatal shot or why Wallace Sampson was selected as a victim.

  Bascom told the Times he would supply that information and other details of the killing to authorities if he were granted immunity from prosecution. He said he was speaking now because he has a fatal disease and wants to die with a clear conscience. “It’s been on my heart all these years,” he said.

  Pennegar has had a stroke and has difficulty speaking. But he also confirmed his involvement and expressed remorse.

  Buchan is aware of the Times investigation but said he would not meet with reporters or respond to attempts by the Times to interview him for this story.

  There is no statute of limitations on state charges involving murder. South Carolina judicial officials would not comment on whether they would reopen an investigation into the Sampson case based on the Times investigation.

  Murder is not a federal crime and there is a statute of limitations on an 1879 law that makes it a federal crime for police or anyone else “acting under color of law” to deprive anyone of their civil rights. For that reason, U.S Justice Department officials told the Times they expected to take no action as a result of the Times’s investigation.

  Wallace Sampson, a 13-year-old middle school student, was shot in the head shortly after midnight as he was walking home after spending the evening visiting his girlfriend, Vanessa Brown. Sampson was taken by Hirtsboro ambulance to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston where he was pronounced dead. An autopsy disclosed that he had been shot in the head with a deer rifle.

  The killing followed a night of racial unrest in Hirtsboro, a poor rural community where all town officials are white but the population is 80 percent black. The unrest included a firebomb thrown at a building near where the shooting of Wallace Sampson occurred the next night.

  Hirtsboro town records show that Magistrate Buchan owned the building.

  Bascom said the killing was in retaliation for the firebombing but the Times found no indication that Wallace Sampson had any role in the firebombing or in the previous evening’s racial unrest. He had no police record. “He was a sweet boy,” said his mother, Etta Mae Sampson. “A sweet, sweet boy.” (Editor’s Note: For a profile of Wallace Sampson, see Page 6.)

  Based on interviews and an extensive review of Hirtsboro town records, the Times found no evidence of any investigation into the killing by city, county or state officials. Pennegar, now disabled, has been succeeded by his son, who initially resisted the Times’s attempt to conduct an investigation.

  As magistrate, Buchan was and is the town’s top judicial officer.

  Reached Saturday, Hirtsboro town clerk Patty Paysinger declined comment.

  The Charlotte Times began looking into the killing of Wallace Sampson after it was contacted by Bradford Hall, 35. Hall is a Harvard-educated botanist whose family owns homes and a hunting preserve known as Windrow Plantation on the Savannah River near Hirtsboro. He had grown curious after hearing about the unsolved killing.

  “It had poisoned Hirtsboro,” Hall said when he met with the Times. “The knowledge of the crime hung over everything.”

  Times reporters found that more than 20 years after the shooting, the incident still polarizes the town, with many blacks convinced that whites were responsible and many whites convinced that Sampson had been killed “by one of his own,” the result of black-on-black violence.

  The events that led to the shooting of Wallace Sampson began the night before with civil unrest that swept through Hirtsboro, a no-stoplight town bisected by the Southern Railway Tracks. Before six squad cars carrying 24 county deputies intervened, a crowd of black youths threw rocks at the Hirtsboro town police cruiser and smashed a half dozen store windows.

  Later, someone threw a firebomb against a single-story, tin-roofed building. The bomb burst into flames. Soot and charring still mark the spot on the building where it hit but the building failed to ignite. The person who threw the firebomb remains unknown.

  The building housed a gas station/grocery store called De Sto which several Hirtsboro residents said had the reputation of taking unfair advantage of the black community.

  “The community knew De Sto was ripping them off,” the Reverend Clifford Grace told the Times. Grace is the pastor of the Mt. Moriah House of Prayer in Hirtsboro. “They just didn’t have the ability to shop elsewhere.”

  But according to two Hirtsboro sources who asked that their names not be used, the building also housed a secret second business, a brothel featuring black prostitutes who catered to temporary workers at the nearby Savannah River nuclear plant. One source said the brothel was a particular irritant to Hirtsboro’s black community.

  “It hurt to know what was going on,” the source said about the brothel, adding that if gouging by De Sto had
been the issue, “it’d have been firebombed long before.”

  Times reporters, along with Bradford Hall, examined the building in question and found indications of the secret brothel business.

  Both businesses were apparently operated by Raeford Watson, a Ku Klux Klan member who was later convicted in state court of beating up civil rights marchers in Columbia. Watson suffered a heart attack the day following the firebombing and is known to have been in the hospital when the shooting of Wallace Sampson occurred. He has since died.

  Bascom told the Times that he, Pennegar and Buchan talked about the shooting as a way to “keep the blacks in their place” and to retaliate for the firebombing which they believed caused Raeford Watson’s heart attack.

  He said that while he had been involved in the incident, he didn’t fire the rifle that killed Sampson and hadn’t expected anyone to die.

  The Times learned about Bascom from a witness who saw him fleeing from the scene of the killing. Bascom lived near Hirtsboro at the time and worked at Ray’s Amoco station.

  According to South Carolina Solicitor Red McCallum, Bascom was a high-ranking official in South Carolina’s Ku Klux Klan who was persuaded to become an informer for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED).

  “Billy Bascom was SLED’s best source of information about what the Klan was up to,” McCallum said. He said Bascom would alert officials to planned illegal Klan activities and then get arrested along with other Klansmen. Later, he would provide testimony at trial and receive leniency. In the case of the Klansmen who beat civil rights marchers in Columbia, Bascom provided testimony that helped convict Watson and two others.

  Bascom “isn’t the bad guy,” McCallum said.

  Bascom confirmed that he served as an informer while in the Klan. He said he told officials about his involvement in the Wallace Sampson killing but doesn’t know why they never pursued the information.

  “I told them everything,” he said. “That wasn’t the only case they never followed up on. Why they followed up on some and not on others is not for me to know. But I told them, all right. And they wrote it all down.”

  SLED officials told the Times the agency would not comment on Bascom’s allegations or even confirm that he had been an informer.

  The Times interviewed Bascom at his home not far from Hirtsboro. He said he consented to be interviewed because he no longer feared retaliation from former fellow Klansmen who would learn about his past as an informer. He told the Times he expected to die soon from cancer.

  “I want to get right with Jesus,” he said. “I’ve reached the point where I’m starting to think about cramming for the final exam.”

  The Times also interviewed O.P. Pennegar Sr., the Hirtsboro town police officer at the time of the Sampson shooting, who recently retired from the force. Though Pennegar has difficulty speaking, he was able to indicate his agreement when presented with Bascom’s version of the Wallace Sampson killing.

  Pennegar wept during the recounting of it.

  The Times spoke with Magistrate Buchan during the course of its investigation into the shooting but Times reporters did not know about allegations of his involvement at the time.

  Contacted last week by Times Columbia Bureau chief Henry Ashley and informed of the details of the upcoming story, Buchan said he was outraged by the Times conduct and would not meet with a reporter or respond to questions.

  The decision about whether to pursue charges in the killing falls to South Carolina Solicitor McCallum who said he would read the story and then decide whether to conduct his own investigation.

  I breathed a sigh of relief that no typographical gremlins had worked their way into our wording. The story was straightforward, dry, and emotionless. That’s how the lawyers wanted it—with no hint of judgment. I had resisted but they were right. We had named the killers of Wallace Sampson. The facts of the story were damning enough.

  I took the paper inside and spread it out on the table so I could examine the entire package—the timeline of events prepared by the art department, the diagram of the scene, the sidebar on Bradford Hall, Bullock’s photos of De Sto and of Mrs. Sampson at Wallace’s grave, a sidebar I was particularly proud of headlined “Wallace Sampson: Never Forgotten” and a box Walker had insisted on titled, “These Questions Remain Unanswered.” In the box were two bullets:

  • Who pulled the trigger?

  • Why Wallace Sampson?

  The box and the bullets were reminders that these and other questions still needed to be answered, along with the most important question: what happens next? But for the most part, I was pleased. We had done what we set out to do.

  I turned to the short story I had written to try to tell readers something that would make them see Wallace Sampson not just as a victim of a civil rights murder or the subject of a newspaper’s crusade but as a thirteen-year-old boy, as a mother’s son.

  Wallace Sampson: Never Forgotten

  By Matt Harper and Ronald L. Bullock

  Charlotte Times Staff Writers

  Every day, Wallace Sampson’s mother visits his grave.

  Etta Mae Sampson leaves flowers and thinks about the copy of Charlotte’s Web that she placed in Wallace’s coffin, the book she had intended to give him for his birthday, before a slug from a deer rifle tore through his brain and killed him a few days before he turned 14.

  And she prays, always the same prayer: “Lord, give me strength to trust that there will be justice in heaven.”

  At night Etta Mae Sampson goes to Wallace’s room. She’s kept it just the way it was when he died. Two pairs of pants and two shirts hung on nails. A baseball bat, its broken handle nailed and taped back together, in a corner. School pictures of puppy-love girlfriends tucked into a small mirror above his dresser. A poster of Hank Aaron. A basketball trophy inscribed “Wallace Sampson–Mr. Rebound” on a small table. Wallace was starting to grow tall like his daddy, she remembers.

  Sometimes she awakes from dreams scared she will forget him. So she comes to this room and lies on his bed and picks up his shirt and she smells him.

  “Each child has their own smell,” she tells a visitor. “My worst time is when I become afraid that I will forget what he looked like and what he smelled like. I think that no one will remember him. So I look at his picture and I smell his shirt and I hold the trophy and I think to myself, I am holding the very thing that he held. And I tell him, ‘You will never, ever, ever be forgotten.’”

  I re-read the story and I stared at Wallace’s picture—the picture of the Saran-wrapped photo on Mrs. Sampson’s wall—until his eyes stared back through me, demanding that I not confuse his story with my complicated feelings involving Dad, Luke and Delana.

  This isn’t about them, his eyes told me. It is about me.

  I held the newspaper up to the sky as if it were an offering. “Here it is, Wallace. This is for you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  For the next two weeks, I lived in two worlds, working in the newsroom until mid-afternoon, burning up the highway to the university to sit for a few hours with Dad each evening, driving home late to get ready to do it all over again. The best and the worst in one day.

  Dad slept a lot while I just watched him. When he was awake, he was mostly lucid. But not always. One afternoon his eyes fluttered open. He pulled himself up and stared out of his window. “Who’s that sitting in the tree?”

  I followed his eyes to dark bare limbs of a water oak swaying in the wind outside. “I don’t think there’s anyone there. Do you see someone?”

  “Yes, it appears to be Strom Thurmond,” he croaked. Then he slid back down and fell asleep.

  Each day, he seemed to grow smaller, to sink deeper into his pillows. Each day I told him I loved him and he said I love you back. Each day I told Delana death could not be far away. In contrast, the newsroom had never been more lively. News had bro
ken out. Reporters and editors seemed to move more crisply, aware that the Charlotte Times itself was the center of attention. Something new developed almost every day.

  Monday, the day after our investigation ran, The Columbia News published a story the general tone of which was that Judge Rutledge Buchan was a respected jurist who’d been blind-sided by long-disproved rumors dredged up by liberal, big-city reporters twisting the word of admitted deceivers and the mentally disabled.

  The centerpiece was an exclusive interview in which Buchan denied any involvement in the Wallace Sampson killing and called the allegations the result of Times reporters “trying to be Woodward and Bernstein.”

  “I ought to be mad, but I’m sad,” Buchan told The News. “They took advantage of a misguided young man from a fine family, a poor retired policeman who developed a mental problem and can’t even talk, bless his heart, and an admitted liar.”

  He said in the story he planned to sue the Charlotte Times because the newspaper had libeled him and the whole town of Hirtsboro. “No one in Hirtsboro,” he added, “has done more for the Negro race than I have.”

  “This is a damned outrage,” Bullock roared when he read it.

  “Yeah. You’d think in this day and time even Buchan’d be aware of his language.”

  Bullock looked puzzled. “I’m talking about the sons of bitches at The News. They didn’t even ask us for comment.”

  Walker tried to calm him. “We just took a big South Carolina story from right under their noses. Of course, they’re gonna try to knock us down.”

  “How about some basic journalistic integrity?” Bullock shot back.

  Walker’s unconcern didn’t head off a long meeting with the Times lawyers. In the corner conference room with the Famous Front Pages, we plowed old ground about our sources while I occasionally amused myself by watching the parade of the paranoid and the curious passing by outside. I paid closer attention when the lawyers opened up a new line of inquiry to see if we had committed any acts during our reporting that might be construed as showing malice toward Judge Buchan.