The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book

by Inc. The Foxfire Fund

  Most of the stories that follow are based on actual murders, robberies, and other crimes that were committed years ago in the mountains of Appalachia. Some of the facts may have been slightly altered as the stories were recounted from one family to the next.

  —Joyce Green

  “A ripple of dramatic emotion swept over the courtroom.”

  ~The 1939 murder of Grace Bingham Brock~

  Saturday, September 24, 1939, would be a day that would shake up the residents of a little town in Habersham County, Georgia, for on this day the gruesome murder of a young woman, Grace Bingham Brock, would be uncovered. The discovery of Mrs. Brock’s body in the cold waters of the Soque River would spur an investigation spanning from Habersham County to Greenville, South Carolina. The evidence that was soon to be uncovered would convince a jury to convict the husband of a beautiful young woman of one of the most brutal murders that has ever been committed in the state of Georgia.

  PLATE 31 “Thousands of people filed past the body of the young woman at Sosebe-McGahee Funeral Parlor.” Grace Bingham Brock

  It was a Saturday when Sam McDuffie and Hoyt Standbridge, both employees of the C. M. Miller Company, accidentally discovered the body. They were hauling apples between the orchard in Cleveland, Georgia, and the packinghouse in the nearby town of Cornelia. They had made numerous trips throughout the day, traveling across a one-lane metal bridge that spanned the Soque. On one of these trips, Mr. McDuffie glanced down on the crystal waters of the river and caught a glimpse of something that would forever be etched in his mind: the feet and legs of a woman, protruding from the surface of the water, which was lower than normal due to the mill having been closed and the dam emptied. The two men went immediately for help.

  The body had been thrown about three hundred feet below Cannon Bridge, with a heavy piece of iron tied around her neck with wire and her skull fractured in three places. A coroner’s jury came to the conclusion that the victim had met her death by blows over the head with a sharp-edged bludgeon. The inquest revealed evidence of a huge struggle at the crime scene. Two pools of blood about two feet apart had been hastily covered with sand, but the blood had seeped through to the top of the mounds. Only one set of footprints was officially documented as leaving the scene, but a witness testified he found two sets of footprints, one a man’s and the other a woman’s, showing the woman was running, apparently trying to escape her assailant. She had circled a large tree several times, and when she was finally overtaken, there was evidence of a struggle. The bruises on the body indicated that the victim had been badly beaten before her death.

  During an examination by a local physician, three severe wounds were found on the deceased’s head, two of which were thought to have caused her death. One extended some four or five inches over the top of her head, and the other—a shorter but deep wound—was slightly above and behind the left ear. There were also many bruises on her face, neck, breasts, and legs, all of which, other than the three large cuts or wounds, could have, in the opinion of the physician, been inflicted by a man’s fist. After this examination was completed, the public was invited to view the body in an effort to make a positive identification.

  Finally, on the Monday following the finding of the body on Saturday, the victim was pronounced upon good authority to be Mrs. Grace Bingham Brock, who was raised in Turnerville, Georgia, in Habersham County and was the wife of Rufus Brock. A friend of Mrs. Brock, Mrs. Lelia Burns, was an important key to the identification. While she was unable to identify the swollen body, she recognized the dress and the shell-bead necklace that Mrs. Brock had been wearing. Mrs. Burns stated that she had made the dress for her daughter and it would not fit, so she had given it to Grace Brock. She also told authorities that she had been with Grace Brock when she purchased the necklace in Greenville, South Carolina, and that Grace was trying to dress up for her husband in an attempt to win back his affections. Grace Brock’s father then made the final identification.

  Well over a thousand people, the largest number of local citizens ever assembled during any court session, crowded the courtroom and halls for possibly the most sensational superior court case in the history of the county. The coroner and sheriff had worked ceaselessly since the body had been discovered. Their detailed account of the investigation resulted in the arrest in Greenville of Rufus Brock, the estranged husband of the slain woman.

  PLATE 32 “We recommend that Rufus Brock be held for murder.” Rufus Brock

  During the trial, a ripple of dramatic emotion swept over the crowded courtroom when a slender, auburn-haired young woman, dressed in a blue-and-white silk dress and gray tweed jacket, took the witness stand. She declared that she was Clara Franklin Massey, a twenty-four-year-old silk mill employee, of Greenville, whom Rufus Brock had married September 3, 1939. In her testimony she stated that she had thought Brock was divorced and that he had abused her on several occasions when she questioned him about his marriage. Mr. Frankum, the prosecuting attorney, entered their marriage certificate as an exhibit in the evidence.

  Several articles of Mr. Brock’s clothing were also entered as exhibits, as was a forty-seven-pound gasket pin, which was traced to the Cornelia railroad yard. An automobile jack taken from Brock’s car was said to have traces of blood mixed with the rust of the metal. Another gruesome exhibit was a torn, bloodstained shirt said to have been worn by Brock on the night of Monday, September 28, when he took his two little boys, ages six and four, to the home of his parents, who lived within a mile of the Cannon Bridge on the river near where the body was found. According to other sources, several strands of hair were attached to the dried blood, which had soaked the shirt.

  Witnesses stated that Brock claimed that as he and his wife and children were returning to Habersham County, they were stopped near the Tugalo River Bridge on the Georgia–South Carolina line. He was attacked by two unidentified men, and Mrs. Brock had then gotten into the car with them and had not been seen since. While Rufus Brock and Grace Bingham were students at Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School, in Rabun Gap, Georgia, they had run away together and been married. Grace was sixteen at the time, and Rufus was eighteen. Four years and two children later, they moved to Greenville. Rufus claimed that Grace had grown tired of city life and returned to Georgia. According to him, she returned to South Carolina several times in an attempt to convince him to move back to Georgia.

  Many holes were found in Rufus’s explanation of Grace’s death, and the fact that he had been seeing—and later married—a woman from South Carolina did not help his case. In 1939, South Carolina refused to legally separate a husband and wife, so divorces were rare. It was surmised that Rufus therefore needed a way out of his predicament, and this was the likely motive for Mrs. Brock’s murder.

  Nineteen of the thirty witnesses subpoenaed in the case were called to the stand during the trial. Evidence was presented, including the victim’s clothes, beads, and shoes and Rufus Brock’s bloody shirt, as well as a car jack on which blood appeared. Once the presentation of this strong circumstantial evidence against Mr. Brock concluded, the jury retired.

  After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury filed into the courtroom to render its verdict of guilty of murder with recommendation for mercy, which virtually meant life imprisonment. They concluded from the evidence presented that Rufus Brock had brutally murdered his wife, Grace, while their two children slept in the backseat of the car. According to witnesses, as the verdict was read, the defendant maintained the same calm, composed manner that he had manifested throughout the trial, and he seemed to be much less agitated than his father and mother and other members of his family, who had remained at his side.

  Since Grace Bingham Brock’s death, many people have reported seeing her ghost, wearing a floral dress, walking on the cool waters of the Soque River in the early hours of the night.

  PLATE 33 Actual copy of handwritten verdict returned by the jury in the murder conviction of Rufus Brock

  Hell-Bent and Whiskey Bound A
Scaly Mountain Murder

  ~As told by Lillie Billingsley~

  Murder and crime in the mountains of Georgia and North Carolina were rare when our grandparents were growing up; however, some of the crimes that did occur were quite gruesome. The following story, told to us by Mrs. Lillie Billingsley of Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, was one we have never forgotten. Her attention to details and somewhat humorous nature as she shared her memories made a lasting impact.

  —Joyce Green

  I’ll tell y’all a story about a man that liked to work in the whiskey business because he made whiskey, he drank whiskey, and he sold it. He was a bad old man. He looked like the boogerman [boogeyman] to me. He used to come by, and he’d say to my daddy, “How about you trade me them two girls and let ’em come stay with me for a while?” My daddy would tell him, “No, they better stay here. We don’t let ’em leave the house too much. They got too many chores to do.” He looked like the boogerman, and I believed that he was the boogerman.

  So he came in one morning about four o’clock, and his wife was making breakfast. He was drunk—pretty well drunk. He had a good old lady—I mean a good’n. Her name was Sis. Sis is what they called her. I don’t know her real name. He come in mad about breakfast, I guess, and he jumped on the poor thang. She was rollin’ her biscuits now, and he just walked up to her and knocked her brains out, I guess. He hit her in the head, and she fell. Well, he seed that he’d killed her, and he didn’t know what he was going to do with the body. He built a fire and drug her in the front room, out of the kitchen, and he put her in the fireplace and burned her. He crammed her head in, and then her shoulders, and then her whole body into the fire. She was a big old fat lady, and the grease run out of her, all down on the floor. It was just real bad, you know. And that grease is still on that floor, they tell me, but I don’t know. I stopped by that house one time and Jim’s sister said, “Lillie, that’s where he killed her.”

  It was bad he killed her—threw her in the fire, and he killed her. He tried to live with that, but he just couldn’t. He knew he’d done such a bad thing to kill his wife. Well, anyway, he decided to confess what he’d done. He tried to live on through the years, but I reckon his conscience got so tore up that he only come out of that house to get the mail. He had to go over this little branch by his house, and him and his horse would get to that branch, and that horse would not go across that branch. He would finally have to get off the horse, and he would have to pull the horse across that little branch. So he just went crazy. When he got old, he went to live with his daughter. Well, he went crazy; he didn’t know what he was doing. They finally had to strap him down in the bed. They said he would just holler and scream. They said he said that he could feel the flames of torment—that they was going to burn him up. Well, he died tied down, and he did confess that he killed her right before he died. They buried him out there behind that old schoolhouse. Now there are five or six graves out there behind that old schoolhouse. I even went to school in that little building. It wudn’t as big as from this table to the wall [motions with her hands]. Mary James was the teacher; she taught five or six of us out there. We walked to school back in them days; we didn’t have no cars or nothing.

  They didn’t have no law in those days. Back then they’d just take ’em [criminals] to some barn—some old house—somewhere and take a rope and put it around their neck and make ’em stand on a chair. Then they would jerk the chair out from under them and then the rope would break their neck, but that’s how they told me it was done, I guess; I wasn’t born in them days. But anyway, that was awful bad, I thought, and it was awful. So then after the man passed on—well, they took him out there. He was buried out there at that school.

  “Well, now, this is a true story.”

  ~A story of birth and death from Melissa Rogers~

  Occasionally, people share with us tales of strange and unexplainable happenings. Mrs. Melissa Rogers told us a story about a young woman who was apparently a witch, and explains why some members of her family believed this.

  —Margie Bennett

  Well, now, this is a true story I’m gonna tell. It’s very true ’cause my mother and my older sister told me about it. This woman [they knew about] had had some girls, and they’d got messed up and had a couple of babies, but nobody never did know what went with the babies. After the others had done married, the younger one got like that.

  One day the thrashers come to help thrash the rye fields. The daddy and the thrashers went out and worked till twelve o’clock, and the mama fixed dinner that day and they come in to eat. The younger daughter’s name was Ada, and her daddy asked where she was at. Her mama said, “Ah, she’s out around here somewhere.” So she went out on the porch and she hollered and hollered, “Oh, Ada! Ada! Come on to dinner!” And she never did come or nothin’.

  And her daddy got ready to go back to the field and he said, “Well, I’m worried about her.” Said, “We better see where she’s at and try to find her.” Said, “This is not like her to not come when she’s called.” So he went on back to the field and worked a little while, and he got worried, and he come back to the house and he got to looking. He called in the neighbors, and finally, at last, they went in an old building, what they used to call a smokehouse, which was made out of just old puncheon-like boards where they stored a lot of stuff. And her mama had took some old plank and stuck it up in the cracks and had Ada a-layin’ up on it, and she’d had that baby and she’d died. They all came in there, and they was a-gettin’ her out and was gonna take her in the house. That’s what they used to do, you know. They’d take ’em in the house and lay ’em out on a table or the bed or something like that for visitation and burial preparation. They didn’t take ’em to the funeral home ’cause they wadn’t anything like that.

  One woman in there said she heared something a-makin’ an awful queer noise, and there was big boxes of all kinda stuff packed up in there, and that woman got to listening and she said, “Well, I hear something.” And the girl’s mother said, “Aw, it’s just probably a rat or something.” Said, “They’re all the time around in here.” And she kept hearin’ it, and she kept hearin’ it, and after a while she got worried and she started a-huntin’.

  And so she got to huntin’ in all them boxes, and that mama had a big box of quilts packed up, and way down about middle ways under them quilts, this neighbor woman found this little baby. And it had the corner of the quilt stuck in its mouth, and she was gonna smother it to death like she’d already done two more. She had ’em out in the garden, and she’d buried ’em under an apple tree in a corner of the garden. And that’s what she was gonna do with that one as quick as it was dead.

  And this neighbor woman, she took the baby home with her, and she kept it and raised it, and I seen her myself when she was grown and married—that one that she had in that box. My sister showed her to me when we was havin’ a big dinner on the ground at church one day. And she said to me, she says, “There is the little girl that was found in the box.” And she is still alive. So that girl lived and stayed on with this woman until she married. She’s a good bit older than I am, but so far as I know, she’s still livin’. And she lives at Hiawassee where my sister does.

  [That woman that killed the babies], they said she was just almost like a witch because she could almost do anything she set her mind to. And the ones that was there when she died—she died at home—they said that they had to hold her in the bed, and that when she died, the clock stopped—the big winding clock on the wall. They said it stopped, dead stopped.

  Last words, in a choked voice: “Good-bye, men.”

  The hanging of Will Brown

  “I was an eyewitness to the killing of the Negro known as Sweet,” stated Charlie Williams. Thus began the trial of Will Brown, accused of murdering the man called Sweet at Lakemont, Georgia, on April 30, 1915. Numerous testimonies and cross-examinations took place in the courtroom that day, but no one testified on Mr. Brown’s behalf. There were no witnes
ses, other than a mysterious lady named Elizabeth, to the prior scuffle or threat outside the dance where the murder took place. No one who was interviewed for this story was able to tell us why Elizabeth did not testify in defense of Mr. Brown, for till his dying day, he professed that the killing was in self-defense.