by Karen L. Cox
The arrest of Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery made the story even more compelling. Headlines in the days that followed their arrest focused on their curious personalities, the wretched condition of Glenwood, and of course the pair’s live-in goats. “Fingerprints and Goats in Murder Case,” wrote the Star-Journal of Sandusky, Ohio, while the Charleston Daily Mail in West Virginia grabbed readers’ attention with “Bloody Fingerprints and Goat Herd Link Eccentric with Woman’s Death,” and the Salt Lake City Tribune led with “Hermit Named as Murderer.” Newspapers from around the country were more than happy to share the extraordinary details of Goat Castle and its strange residents because the story sold well.4
As Sheriff Clarence Roberts and his cohorts worked diligently to solve what was widely described as a “southern mystery,” reporters investigated and wrote about the principals. Stories about the lives of Jennie Merrill, Duncan Minor, Dick Dana, Octavia Dockery, and, to a lesser extent, George Pearls and Emily Burns sustained people’s interest in the case and in Natchez for weeks. Goat Castle, too, took on a life of its own because the actual conditions of Dana’s home and estate defied belief. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Bruce Catton, a young journalist at the time, asked rhetorically, “Can a novelist have invented a more fascinating, hair-raising tale of decay and morbid gloom than this one from real life?”5
The narrative surrounding Jennie Merrill centered on her lineage and the turn her life had taken in the decades that precipitated her death. Accounts of her life always included the fact that she was the daughter of Ayres Merrill, the former Belgian ambassador. An Ohio paper, for example, described her as the “vivacious, charming daughter of the late Ayres Merrill who as friend of President Grant and Ambassador to Belgium saw her presented at the Court of St. James.” Despite there being no evidence to support it, the tale of being presented to Queen Victoria at St. James’s Palace often found a place in accounts of her life. Papers also described her as a “southern belle” or “belle of the Old South,” playing up her relationship to the planter class.6
Still, reporters appeared focused on her alleged withdrawal from broader society. The Natchez Democrat, Jennie’s hometown paper, was the first to call her a recluse and, at nearly sixty-nine years old, an “aged lady.” The New York Times referred to her as the “envoy’s daughter” and described her as a woman who refused to join the modern age. “She lived as nearly as possible in the manner of the ante-bellum South,” the Times reported and suggested that when she retired from society in the 1890s, her fashion tastes were locked in time. “She dressed always in the manner of a lady of fashion of forty years ago.” There were also reports that she had posted a sign on her driveway gate warning visitors to “Keep Out.”7
There was something peculiar about a woman who had wealth and an aristocratic lineage retreating from the world. With only that to go on, the press repeatedly referred to her as an “aged recluse,” a “wealthy recluse,” an “elderly recluse,” and even a “wealthy eccentric.” Her name and money were a reflection of her aristocratic lineage, but her behavior, many believed, was a sign of her social decline as well as that of the Old South.
“Forty years ago Miss Merrill, daughter of a former ambassador and one-time ‘belle of the south,’ had wealth, position and fame,” Bruce Catton wrote, “but something went wrong, somewhere.” Not only had the “gay old culture departed” but Merrill, just like her neighbors, had become “eccentric, grim-lipped, [and] mysterious.” Catton then pointed to the Old South’s decay, where the romantic “culture in the pillared mansions” of both Glenburnie and Glenwood had vanished. “Once these were famous southern plantations,” he observed. “Now they are dilapidated, unkempt, weed-grown, their fine manor houses grown decrepit and gloomy, their imposing driveways bordered with rank grasses and undergrowth.” Their homes had become a reflection of the people who inhabited them.8
Some of Jennie’s fellow Natchezeans sought to correct the narrative of the reclusive belle. Zaida Wells, who drove past Glenburnie on the night of the murder, found the phrase “aged recluse” thoughtless and unkind. “People are as old or as young as they make themselves,” Wells wrote, “and Miss Jennie was not old.” “She was a very alert, healthy little woman who drove her car into town every day attending to her own business,” she continued. And while she may have been one of the “charter members of Natchez” and a woman of refinement, she was also well liked by “the busy working element of especially Franklin street,” where she did her shopping, and “[exchanged] with them a pleasant word and a smile.” In essence, Jennie may not have been social, but she was a nice person to all who interacted with her.9
Jennie’s cousin Charlotte Surget McKittrick and her husband, David, along with their daughter, Catharine MacRae, offered their own recollections of Jennie to Times-Picayune reporter Gwen Bristow, one of a few women writing articles about the case. Sitting on the veranda of their home, Elms Court, where Jennie often returned between her travels, they talked about the woman they knew. Jennie, like her mother, was “very fond of parties and all sorts of social gatherings,” Charlotte McKittrick said. Referring to Jennie by her birth name, Jane Merrill, Charlotte spoke of her cousin as “a beautiful woman, a dark brunette, with a tremendous quantity of curly brown hair and long, narrow dark eyes. Her hair never turned gray.” She added that Jennie “looked at least 15 years younger than her actual age.” What about her being a recluse? David McKittrick answered firmly, “She didn’t retire from the world abruptly, like a nun.” Like many women do when they grow older, “she gradually went out less and less, and then ceased going to parties at all.”10
Jennie’s relationship with her cousin Duncan Minor also piqued curiosity. Reporters repeatedly referred to him as her “boyhood sweetheart,” a man who had courted Merrill in their youth. Rumors abounded as to why they had never married. Some in Natchez heard that “an uncle had threatened to disinherit him if he married [her],” while others believed his mother disliked Jennie. Minor never discussed whether the two were married but told reporters he had lived in the Merrill home for several years. He certainly spent his evenings there and had done so for decades, a ritual that began when his mother was still alive.11
Duncan moved into Glenburnie after Jennie was buried and soon refused interviews from reporters. Without a definitive answer from Duncan, newspapers continued to speculate on whether the “boyhood sweetheart” and the “envoy’s daughter” ever married. On that, David McKittrick was emphatic. “Yes, I think she was married to Duncan Minor,” he said. “I think that for some reason she told him she would marry him if he’d never say that she had, whether she lived or died,” McKittrick surmised, “and I think he’s keeping his promise.” Why would she want it kept secret? He couldn’t say.12
It was all speculation, of course. Yet the stories of courtship, romance, parental disapproval, and a secret marriage provided all of the elements of a melodrama playing out among the last remaining descendants of southern aristocracy. Then, out of nowhere, a woman from the Midwest entered the story.
Nellie Grist added to the mystery surrounding Jennie Merrill’s life. The thirty-year-old woman from Greenfield, Indiana, hinted that she might contest the dead woman’s will — which had left everything to Duncan Minor — because of a visit she had from an attorney in Jackson, Mississippi. One “Mr. Austin” traveled to her home in Indiana to tell her that Jennie had left instructions to notify her in the event of her death.13
While an attorney named H. L. Austin existed in Jackson, he was unknown to both Nellie Grist and to local Natchezeans. The Indiana woman said she did not understand why Austin contacted her. She was not personally acquainted with Jennie, and the only possible connection between the two women was that Grist’s father once had business dealings with Merrill’s father. And yet, given the Depression and the substantial worth of Jennie’s estate, Nellie Grist told her local paper that she intended to visit Natchez to make her own investigation.14
When asked about this latest tur
n of events, Duncan Minor’s attorney, Saul Laub, laughed it off. Laub, also the mayor of Natchez, told reporters, “It is ridiculous. We expect no contests from anyone. The Grist woman isn’t coming here and if she does, she will be wasting her time.” Even as the mayor scoffed at the notion of Grist’s claim, it did not prevent locals from speculating what her connection to Jennie Merrill might be. Grist did not come to Natchez, and while the story subsided that fall, it did not go away and only added to the circus-like atmosphere being generated by Goat Castle and its residents.
For newspapers whose intended audience was white readers, the descendants of slaves did not merit the same interest as the descendants of slave owners. George Pearls and Emily Burns were simply “negroes.” Reporters never sought Emily out for an interview to learn her life story or to give her a chance to defend her innocence. Emily was presumed guilty because of her race, whether or not she pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Jennie Merrill. This was even truer for black men in the South, who were regularly arrested for petty crimes — much less murder — and made up the vast majority of the region’s prison population.15
From the outset, the reports on George Pearls — the man Natchez knew as Lawrence Williams — indicated how southern whites generally regarded the character of black men who behaved independent of white society. Duncan Minor found Williams “insolent” for the way he addressed him when asking for work. For days, the Natchez Democrat assumed that Williams was a drifter with no local ties. His outsider status, as a black man who lived in the North, led Sheriff Roberts and reporters to dub Pearls the “Chicago-Detroit negro,” even after they determined he had been born in Natchez. There was also the paternalistic reference to Pearls, a fifty-seven-year-old man, as Minor’s former “yard boy,” not that he had once worked for Minor as a young man. Finally, there was Pine Bluff police deputy Robert Henslee, who referred to Pearls as a “suspicious character” for no other reason than he did not recognize him as a local. And the truth may never be known as to whether Pearls resisted arrest or simply refused to answer questions, because Henslee assumed the former and shot him six times in what the Times-Picayune once exaggerated was a “gun duel.”16
Only African American newspapers gave black suspects like Emily Burns and George Pearls any respect. From the New York Amsterdam News to the Kansas City Plaindealer, black newspapers referred to Pearls without any qualifiers like “Chicago negro” and used the title “Miss” or “Mrs.” when referring to Emily Burns. “Mrs. Emily Burns” offered her respectability not given by whites and suggested that she was a lady. The Plaindealer also pointed out what white Natchezeans refused to acknowledge about the case: that despite an investigation that revealed a years-long quarrel between Merrill and the residents of Glenwood, and in the face of the positive identification of Dana’s and Dockery’s fingerprints from inside Glenburnie, “the police inquiry was pushed among the Negroes of the environs of the state.” The paper also expressed doubt of Emily’s guilt by reporting that “an alleged confession was obtained from Mrs. Burns.”17
There was no doubt, however, that what drew America’s attention to Natchez for weeks in the fall of 1932 was not so much the mystery of who killed Jennie Merrill but the two people arrested and charged with her murder — Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery. Their personal stories and the life they led on their run-down estate was so shocking that the other principals in the case were nearly forgotten. A woman from Port Gibson, Mississippi, in a letter to her aunt, suggested as much. “It is more weird and exciting than any mystery story I have read in such a long time,” she wrote, adding, “and made more tragic because the parties involved came of such high families and have sunk so low.”18
Local people, both black and white, who lived and worked on estates on or near the Kingston Road had long known about Glenwood and its residents. So did Book Roberts and his deputies, who had been there several times to settle disputes between them and Jennie Merrill. A few, like Odell Ferguson and John Geiger, had logged trees on the estate. They had all experienced what the rest of Natchez, and America, were about to discover — that Dick Dana was odd. Very odd. And his guardian, Octavia Dockery, while self-composed, behaved as if the barnlike state of Glenwood was normal.
Stories of the pair both intrigued and shocked readers, especially the details of Dick Dana’s behavior. Dana, they learned, regularly left the house and stayed in the woods around Glenwood for long intervals where hunters or loggers were often the only ones to encounter him. He dashed behind trees to avoid being seen, and when asked, “Dick Dana, why are you hiding?” his reply was, “This is not Dick Dana. Dick Dana has gone to New York to sing in the choir of Christ Church.” His wardrobe consisted of gunnysacks — burlap bags with a hole cut out for the head — and he rarely bathed. His hair was long and greasy, and some said his scraggly beard reached a yard in length.19
The press homed in on Dana’s “wild” nature. The New York Times referred to him as an “eccentric woodsman,” and the New Orleans Times-Picayune called him the “wild eccentric” while the Jackson, Mississippi, paper simply called him a “hermit.” Newspapers across the country amped up their stories of Dana with descriptions of his wild appearance, enticing readers by calling him the “bearded and long-haired recluse.” Even his hometown newspaper described him as “eccentric and queer.”20
The press was far kinder to Octavia Dockery, but this was because she controlled the narrative of her life from her jail cell. In early reports, Octavia was simply known as Dana’s guardian or housekeeper. She was the foil to Natchez’s “wild man.” At worst, her link to her ward might elicit a headline like that in a Missouri newspaper: “Eccentric Master and Mistress of ‘Goat Castle’ Alleged to Have Killed Neighbor Recluse.” Then, in a photo of the pair that appeared in newspapers throughout the country, there was the suggestion of some romance between the two as it circulated with the caption that she was Dana’s “aged sweetheart.”21
This photo of Octavia Dockery and Dick Dana, taken within days of their arrest, circulated in newspapers nationwide along with stories of the “Wild Man” and “Goat Woman.” (Courtesy of the Earl Norman Photograph Collection, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Miss.)
The jailhouse photo of the odd couple certainly fueled the bizarre story of their lives. If the sheriff was annoyed by reporters desperate for details in the case, he had only himself to blame. Only a few days following their arrest, Book Roberts allowed Earl Norman, the owner of a successful photo studio in Natchez, to take photographs of Dick and Octavia at the jail, individually and as a pair. The intention, according to the Natchez Democrat, was to send the photos “to the large news agencies of the country and large dailies [throughout the South.]”22
One photo, in particular, circulated widely because it captured an image of Dana and Dockery that was so well suited to the “Wild Man” and “Goat Woman” storyline. Dana may not have had his long hair and even longer beard, but his unkempt appearance and glassy stare furthered the narrative of the “wild man in the woods.” Likewise, the image of Octavia Dockery, who appeared in a floppy straw hat and floral print dress covered with a blue smock, complemented the narrative of a farm woman who not only managed a goat herd but also the mentally ill man sitting next to her.
Certainly the eccentricities of everyone involved in the case provided enough detail to fill more than a few news columns, but what made it all the more fascinating to readers were the contrasts between their lives as young “aristocrats” and what had become of them as they aged. On the one hand, they were descendants “of the flower of old southern aristocracy” and all of the romance that entailed. Both Jennie and Octavia were represented as “belles.” Duncan Minor was a “dashing suitor,” and even Dick Dana came off as a “gay blade” who, when he played piano in the parlors of Natchez, was a favorite among young society women. Some papers even manufactured the possibility that there had been a romance between Dana and Jennie Merrill. One paper claimed Dick and Octavia had abandoned the life
they led “in the days of duels and chivalry.” Yet so much of it was fiction, because none of the white principals grew up in the Old South. That world had dissolved long ago. But it did not matter, because it provided the “weird contrast,” as one paper described it, to their stories of decay and ruin.23
The accounts of Dick and Octavia’s lives, more than any others, drove the national story of murder and mystery in Natchez. Jennie Merrill’s life story was recreated from secondhand accounts. Duncan Minor refused interviews. But what the national media craved was the story of social decline, wrapped in strange behavior — a story, as one reporter described it, “as dramatic and full of pathos as any ever told by the facile pen of Edgar Allan Poe.”24
While reporters were intrigued by the eccentricities of the odd couple of Goat Castle, Dick and Octavia’s connections to Old South elite — real and imagined — are what made their current circumstances even more peculiar. Much of it unfolded in the interviews Dana and Dockery gave from their jail cells a few days following their arrest. Regional newspapers, as well as those outside of the South, printed all or portions of the interviews, often embellishing the details.
Dick Dana personally provided the particulars of his own life story that helped to explain how he went from being “a scion of one of the South’s most distinguished families,” as one paper reported, to becoming the “wild man of the woods.” He explained his ancestral connections to the Danas of New England that included authors, ministers, and the publisher of the New York Sun. He told of being educated at Chamberlain-Hunt Academy in Port Gibson, the Mississippi town where his father once served as rector, and of the two years he spent at Vanderbilt University. Then he went on to tell the story of his music career and its demise. “For a time I studied music in New York and sang in the choir of Christ Church. Before my hand was injured by a fallen window,” he explained, “I had a considerable reputation as a pianist.” He seemed to be aware of his disheveled state by way of describing himself in younger days. “I was fond of society, prided myself on my appearance, and considered myself a man of parts,” he said, continuing, “I did not shun social contacts. . . . I sought them, for it was impressed upon my mind that no true Southern gentleman would be a ‘stick.’” He claimed that a failed romance with a woman from the “mountains of New England” and his maimed hand were the reasons he returned to Natchez.25