Anatomy of Injustice

by Raymond Bonner

  On Saturday, January 16, the day the police said Mrs. Edwards was murdered, Elmore had driven from Abbeville to Greenwood, borrowing his sister’s 1973 Ford LTD, as he often did, hoping to find work. He first stopped at Kmart, where Mary worked. She told him to come back at four, when she would have her lunch break. He left and drove a short distance to the neighborhood where Mrs. Edwards lived. He first went to Mrs. Wingard’s, just around the corner from Dorothy Edwards. Elmore had worked for her before. She didn’t need any chores done, but she told Elmore that a neighbor, Mrs. Blaylock, needed her gutters cleaned. He asked Mrs. Wingard to call Mrs. Blaylock to see if she wanted the work done that day. Mrs. Wingard was happy to do so, and Mrs. Blaylock said yes. She was an eighty-seven-year-old widow who for years had taught piano to the neighborhood girls and boys.

  The gutters on the Blaylock house were quite small, making it hard to get a hand into them, which meant a lot of cuts. Elmore told Mrs. Blaylock he wanted $30, which she thought was high, but her gutters were quite clogged with leaves and she really wanted them cleaned. She didn’t want a black man to think she had that much cash in the house, however, so she said she’d pay by check; he agreed.

  He worked only a short time, then left to take Mary to lunch.

  Elmore wasn’t very happy when Mary came out with two of her coworkers. They all climbed into Elmore’s car and drove a few minutes to Po’ Folks. She ate; he only drank coffee. He didn’t have enough to pay for the meal. She gave him a dollar. He pleaded with her to let him move back in. No. She was firm. They left a few minutes before five, and he drove them back to Kmart. He went back to Mrs. Blaylock’s to finish his work.

  He didn’t do much before it was dark and starting to rain.

  “Come inside while I write your check,” Mrs. Blaylock said. It wasn’t customary for a white woman to let a black man into her house, but Mrs. Blaylock later testified at Elmore’s trial that it was the only humane thing to do; she could not let him stand in the cold. He stayed a few steps inside the door while she went over to the kitchen table and wrote out a check for $15.

  He drove to the Kmart shopping center, got out of his car, walked to the pay phone in front of Big Star, and called Mary. She was irritated. She didn’t have time to talk, she said. She was doing inventory. But did he have $10? He did, from the $15 check he had just cashed. He walked into Kmart and found her in the shoe department. He gave her the money.

  He went back outside and waited. At 9:30, she finished work. She had asked her brother Donnie to pick her up. He was there in Mary’s car, a 1976 Mustang, along with his wife, Sue.

  Walking to her car, Mary saw Edward parked in front of Big Star. She ignored him. She climbed in with Donnie and Sue, and they drove on Route 25 past the Holiday Inn and McDonald’s. They headed to Mary’s mother’s house, to pick up Mary’s daughter. They sat around talking until 10:30 or a bit later, and then they all went to Mary’s apartment at Greenwood Gardens.

  Around 12:30 a.m., Elmore showed up. When he knocked on the door, Sue opened it. Elmore rushed in and went straight to Mary’s bedroom. He’d had a couple of beers. She insisted that he leave. It got louder. Mary’s daughter was crying. Mary and Edward were yelling at each other. He asked her if he had left any clothes at her house. No, she said. She had thrown them all away. That set him off again. He took off his coat and started unbuttoning his shirt, then just ripped it off and threw it on the floor. Another temper tantrum.

  “Mary, I want you, can’t nobody gonna git you,” Edward told her.

  “I told you to go on, go on, we’re through, we’ve been through,” Mary shouted back.

  Elmore sat down on the floor. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, ain’t goin’ nowhere without Mary.”

  He wouldn’t leave. So Mary decided she’d leave, go over to her mother’s. On her way out, she picked up his shirt and threw it in the kitchen wastebasket, put on her own jacket, turned out the lights, and left. She spent the night at her mother’s. Sunday morning, she went back to her apartment. She realized Elmore had spent the night there. He was gone now. She threw his shirt in the trash outside.

  Elmore had left about 7:00 a.m., stopped at Fast Fare, a convenience store and gas station, and bought a dollar’s worth of gas, enough to get him to his mother’s in Abbeville. He spent Sunday drinking beer and watching television.

  On Monday, the day Mrs. Edwards’s body was found, Elmore went into Greenwood looking for work but decided the weather was too bad and returned home.

  THE ARREST

  GREENWOOD POLICE, warrant in hand, began looking for Elmore on Tuesday afternoon. He wasn’t hiding, hadn’t run. He was three blocks away from Mrs. Edwards’s house, having resumed his work cleaning the gutters at Mrs. Blaylock’s. Less than twenty-four hours before, she had seen the police cars at her friend’s house and soon learned what had happened, but she saw no reason to be nervous about Elmore. When he finished, she gave him a check for $15, which he cashed, and then he drove home to Abbeville. That evening, he drove back to Greenwood to see Mary, as if their Saturday fight hadn’t happened or they had fought so often that it didn’t faze him. It was a repeat of Saturday. Her sister-in-law Sue opened the door and let him in. Mary was in the bedroom. She shouted that she was finished with him and told him to leave. He refused. They argued. He said he was going to buy cigarettes. Mary yelled that when he came back, the door would be locked. That’s okay, he said; he would come in the window in the children’s bedroom. He’d done that often, and she never objected. He went for cigarettes, came back, and climbed through the window. Again, she demanded that he leave. He wanted to stay.

  Mary had had enough. She was going to call the police. She didn’t have a phone at home, so she threw her coat on over her nightclothes and stomped out of the apartment. He followed. She got into her Mustang, and he hurriedly climbed in on the passenger side. She drove four blocks to Fast Fare, got out, and walked to the pay phone, which was outside. He was right behind her. She called the police. She told the duty officer that her boyfriend had broken into her apartment and that he wouldn’t leave. She and Elmore got back in her car and returned to the apartment. It was after midnight.

  The Greenwood Gardens Apartments were only a mile from the Greenwood police station, and within minutes, officers Ray Manley and Randy Miles pulled into the parking lot. They went to building 15, at the south end of the complex, and knocked on the brown door with an A on it. Mary let them in and pointed to Elmore. When Manley heard the name, he recalled the arrest warrant that had been issued only a few hours earlier. He radioed for backup.

  Detectives Gary Vanlerberghe and Perry Dickenson, who were patrolling nearby, arrived within minutes.

  “This is Elmore,” Manley told them.

  “Are you Edward Lee Elmore?” asked Vanlerberghe.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Vanlerberghe, who had joined the Greenwood Police Department in 1978 after leaving the air force, asked Elmore to step outside, which he compliantly did.

  They told him he was being arrested for the murder of a woman on Melrose Terrace. “I didn’t do it,” Elmore said softly. Elmore’s demeanor surprised Vanlerberghe. Elmore didn’t resist; he didn’t give them any verbal abuse. “Docile” was how Vanlerberghe described him. Maybe he didn’t do it, Vanlerberghe thought.

  Elmore and four cops, including Manley, a fourteen-year veteran on the force, who was a huge man—280 pounds, with a nineteen-and-a-half-inch neck—walked to the parking lot. The police patted Elmore down, but they didn’t handcuff him. They put him in the backseat and drove to the jail, officially called Greenwood Law Enforcement Center, a one-story, sand-colored brick structure built in 1976. It was 2:45 a.m.

  Elmore sat at a table across from Detective Dickenson, who was in street clothes. Johnson and Coursey were present. Dickenson read Elmore his Miranda rights, which were printed on a card he carried in his pocket, as police officers around the country have done since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona that a def
endant’s statement to police is inadmissible at trial if the suspect has not been advised of his constitutional rights to a lawyer and to remain silent.

  “Do you understand each of these rights I’ve explained to you?” Dickenson said.

  Yes, said Elmore.

  “Do you want a lawyer?”

  No, Elmore said.

  “Do you want to answer questions now?”

  He was willing to—but he was befuddled. Who was he charged with murdering? he asked Detective Dickenson again.

  “Mrs. Dorothy Edwards.”

  Elmore said he didn’t know any “Mrs. Dorothy Edwards.”

  “Do you mean to tell me that you do not know Mrs. Edwards, the elderly lady who lives on Melrose Terrace, the street behind the First Baptist Church?” Coursey asked impatiently.

  “No, I do not know her,” Elmore said.

  “You mean you did not do any windows or gutters for Mrs. Edwards?” Coursey said.

  “I do windows and gutters, but I don’t know a Mrs. Edwards,” Elmore said.

  There were a lot of seemingly simple things Edward Elmore didn’t know or comprehend. He couldn’t tell you the street Mrs. Edwards or Mrs. Blaylock lived on, or any of the other people he worked for; he only knew how to get there. He told Dickenson and Coursey he had worked for “Mrs. Henrietta,” but Henrietta was the street—near Melrose Terrace—and the woman who lived there was Mrs. Wingard.

  Sergeant Johnson showed Elmore the State Farm Insurance card on which he had scrawled Mrs. Edwards’s name and phone number; the police had found it in his wallet. Coursey told him that the police had a check for $43 that Mrs. Edwards had written to him and that he had cashed. Now Elmore knew who they were talking about.

  Coursey asked Elmore if he would give a blood sample. He signed a consent form. Coursey also wanted hair samples. He pulled a comb through Elmore’s Afro. He then took him into the shower and ordered him to lower his jeans. He didn’t notice any injuries or bruises in the groin area, he would later testify. Coursey pulled on a pair of latex gloves and ran the comb through Elmore’s pubic hair. Normally that was all that the police would do; the hairs that were loose and fell out during combing were enough for comparison purposes. But with a tweezers, Coursey yanked out more hairs. Eight or ten hairs, maybe a dozen, are enough for comparison purposes. Coursey collected at least sixty. He put the hairs in a ziplock baggie, which was sent to SLED for analysis.

  Tom Henderson took over the questioning. When Elmore was first brought into the police station, Coursey had called Henderson, who was asleep at his mother’s. He dressed quickly and was at the jail in minutes. Henderson again advised Elmore of his Miranda rights. Elmore again said he didn’t need a lawyer, that he would answer any questions.

  Are these your shoes? Henderson asked, showing him the shoes Elmore had been wearing when arrested.

  Yes, sir.

  How long have you been wearing them?

  Long time, said Elmore. He wore them all the time.

  All weekend? asked Henderson.

  Yes, sir.

  On Saturday, the sixteenth? Yes, sir.

  Henderson told him the stains on the shoes looked like blood. Any idea how that got there? Henderson asked.

  No, sir, no idea, said Elmore.

  Been killing any cows or hogs or any kind of animal, or you been walking in blood? Henderson asked sarcastically, his signature interrogation technique.

  No, sir, Elmore said respectfully.

  The interrogation went on for more than two hours. The police had concluded that Mrs. Edwards had been murdered Saturday evening, based on what Holloway had told them, as well as the coffeepot and the alarm clock being on. They asked Elmore what he had been doing that day. He told them about borrowing his sister’s car, driving to Greenwood, working for a woman who lived near Mrs. Wingard, driving back to Kmart, eating at Po’ Folks with Mary and two friends, finishing at “that lady’s house on Henrietta Avenue” (it was Mrs. Blaylock, and she lived on North Street). He went on to say that he had gone back to Kmart and given Mary $10, that she had been picked up by her brother Donnie, that he had gone to her apartment, that she got mad at him and left to go to her mother’s, and that he had spent the night. (He did not go into detail about the fight he and Mary had had.)

  Henderson dictated a summary of what Elmore had said to a secretary, who typed it up; it was slightly more than a page in length. At 5:05 a.m., Elmore signed it. He’d gone almost twenty-four hours without sleep. Now he was driven to SLED headquarters in Columbia for more interrogation. Henderson and Johnson went with him.

  MEANWHILE, the police moved swiftly to gather evidence. It was still dark on Wednesday morning when Dickenson and Vanlerberghe drove to Abbeville. They woke a local judge, Mary Daniels, to countersign a search warrant. Then they went to the Hickory Heights Apartments, where Peggy lived. It was 7:45 in the morning. The police officers knocked on the window of apartment 4F, waking her. Peggy got up and came to the door. Do you have a brother, Edward, she was asked? Yes. They asked for permission to search her car, which was parked in the south lot of the Greenwood Gardens Apartments. They didn’t say why. She didn’t feel she had any choice. “The police do what they want to,” she said later. “I didn’t want to go to jail.” She signed the consent form. They now told her that her brother had been arrested for murdering a woman. After they left, she drove into Greenwood to see him, to find out what was going on. But he was already in Columbia being questioned by SLED.

  The police officers walked over to apartment A, where Edward’s mother lived, and Edward, too, when he wasn’t with Mary. They introduced themselves and showed Mrs. Elmore the warrant. It authorized them to search for “a ladies clutch purse, money with blood marks, male shoes and male clothing which may contain blood marks and/or hairs of one Edward Lee Elmore or Dorothy E. Edwards, deceased, and a pistol firearm.” She couldn’t read it, but she wasn’t about to say no to any white police officer either, and led them to her son’s tiny room, which he shared with his brother. There wasn’t much in it. A corduroy jacket and a pair of Levi’s were hanging on the door. There were a few small reddish spots on the jeans. The officers took them.

  Another Greenwood police team went to Mary Dunlap’s apartment in Greenwood. She, too, consented to a search. While there, with the permission they had from Peggy, the police took the LTD and drove it to the station. The police vacuumed the seats and floorboards, front and back, sure they would find some hair or fibers Elmore had picked up while raping and murdering Mrs. Edwards. They came up with half a garbage pail of dirt and debris; Henderson delivered it to SLED for analysis. He described the contents: “Vacuum bag samples from floor of car driven by Edward Elmore on the day he murdered Dorothy Edwards.”

  Henderson wasn’t being careless when he wrote “murdered” and not “allegedly murdered.” By that time, he explained during a deposition in the case years later, the police “had firmly reached the conclusion” that Elmore had murdered Dorothy Edwards.

  “Area Man Faces Murder Charge” The Index-Journal trumpeted in a three-column headline at the top of the page on its Wednesday afternoon paper. And the police considered the case closed. “No other arrests expected,” said the police chief, John Young.

  The tests on the vacuumed debris revealed nothing. Nor was there any blood in the car. The police found nothing incriminating in Mary’s apartment either. They never found Mrs. Edwards’s Aigner clutch purse, or the gun, which Holloway said she kept next to her bed. That didn’t sway Henderson, the police, or the prosecutor.

  THE DEATH PENALTY

  TWO DAYS AFTER Elmore was arrested, the Greenwood County solicitor, William T. Jones, a powerful and legendary figure, told the court during a hearing following Elmore’s arraignment that he intended to seek the death penalty. It was not a surprise, given the history of Jones and the state.

  South Carolina has been executing criminals as long as it has existed, as a colony and a state. Hanging rope gave way to the electric chair in
1912, and since 1995, the condemned can choose between the electric chair and lethal injection. The state has the distinction of having put to death the youngest person to be executed in the United States in the twentieth century, George Stinney. An African American, he was fourteen years old when he was convicted, in 1944, of murdering two white girls. The only evidence against him was his supposed confession. An all-white jury convicted him in ten minutes. His arrest, trial, and execution took less than two months.

  The American colonies adopted capital punishment from England, where public hanging, burning at the stake, and beheading were the punishments for anyone convicted of a felony, which included shoplifting and stealing a spoon or rabbits, as well as treason, murder, and marrying a Jew. When English juries balked at convicting defendants for petty crimes because they knew it meant death, Parliament steadily reduced the number of capital offenses, until execution could be imposed only for murder and treason. The British government abolished the death penalty altogether in the 1960s, even though polls showed the overwhelming majority of the public supported it.

  When it came to writing the Constitution, the Founding Fathers left the issue of execution—along with other punishments—to the states, and hangings continued to be public spectacles. Only a few early American leaders were opposed to the death penalty, most notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and the first organized opposition came with the formation of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment in 1845. Many of its members were also active in the anti-slavery movement. Even back then, and not just in the South, blacks made up a disproportionate number of those executed. It wouldn’t happen “to a white man with money,” a Boston newspaper wrote about the hanging of a black seaman, Washington Goode, whose case became a rallying cry for abolitionists; some four hundred Concord residents, including Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, signed a petition calling on the governor to commute his sentence. Connecticut was the first state to abolish public executions, in 1830, and Michigan was the first state to do away with capital punishment altogether, in 1846, followed quickly by Rhode Island and Wisconsin. (One hundred fifty years later, the Wisconsin district attorney who prosecuted Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer who murdered and dismembered at least seventeen boys and men, explained why he was opposed to the death penalty. “I have a gut suspicion of the state wielding the power of death over anybody,” said E. Michael McCann. “To participate in the killing of another human being, it diminishes the respect for life. Period.”) In the South, punishment by death was tied up with slavery—inciting slaves to run away and the striking of a white person by a slave were capital crimes—and all southern states have the death penalty today.