by Karen L. Cox
Charles Anderson described what Emily told him in her cell, confirming much of what sheriff’s deputies had testified to regarding what had happened at the Merrill home. Anderson then testified to what came next. She told him that after she and Pink returned home, “he took off his bloody clothes and she put them in a tub with some stain remover and water.” He then grabbed a bundle of clothes, and the two of them “went down Reynolds Street to the railroad, [then] up the railroad to Aldrich Street.” Poe was waiting for them with his car. “[We] got in the car,” she told Anderson, then “drove out Pine Street to Oak Street, down Oak to Cemetery [Road], out Cemetery to a hill where [Pink] left.” Sister and Poe then returned to Natchez.24
Emily’s minister had just confirmed the details of her confession about who was there the night of the murder. She had implicated herself, but she was also caught up in a bad situation with no simple way out. He reaffirmed that Poe was involved, as Emily had always said. Anderson’s testimony also demonstrated Sister’s loyalty to Pink, which she maintained even at her own peril. While Reverend Anderson did not say anything about her state of mind, Geisenberger seems to have used his testimony to suggest that given the events of that night, no one in her right mind would have become willingly involved.
The defense next called Mrs. H. L. Baker to the stand, whose testimony would suggest that Emily was not at the crime scene that evening. Mrs. Baker and her husband had been walking near the Merrill home near dusk on the night of August 4. She testified that she saw a man with a black hat and overcoat walking toward the Merrill home but was unsure “if he was white or colored.” She said no one was with him. If this man had been the murderer, then the implication was he acted alone or could have been white.25
Geisenberger was planting seeds of doubt, and with the next few witnesses he pressed not necessarily an insanity defense but a defense that demonstrated that his defendant’s mental state left her incapable of making anything but poor decisions. Along those lines, the defense called Dr. A. W. Dumas to the stand. Dumas, a black physician at the Natchez Sanitarium, testified that he had treated Emily Burns and “did not consider her perfectly sane.” He believed her to be “abnormal,” and it was his opinion that “she was suffering from dementia praecox,” a condition that many contemporary psychiatrists had begun to diagnose as schizophrenia.26
Dr. Dumas’s testimony set the stage for the next witnesses — people who knew Emily Burns personally. Sarah Elmore, who ran the East End Beer Parlor on St. Catherine Street near Emily’s home, testified, as did Edward Sims, a neighbor who lived around the corner from her on Cedar Avenue. Both of them attested to her strange behavior and claimed that she had “fits” and “spasms,” during which time she “foamed at the mouth.” Then, in what had to be a difficult experience for both mother and daughter, Nellie Black testified that her own child “was not well or normal and had fits during which she acted crazy.”27
After their testimony, the state called Book Roberts, Chief Deputy Joseph Stone, and Special Deputy John Junkin back to the stand to dispute the previous testimony by testifying that Emily Burns was “perfectly sane” while she was in jail. Months before, Stone was quoted in the Natchez Democrat describing Emily Burns as “bright” and “smart,” but then he seemed to contradict himself by saying, “She must be telling us the truth, because no sane person would hang herself like she has in her confession.” If only Emily’s defense team had been given a little longer to prepare, Stone’s public statement could have been used to dispute his own testimony.28
There was one person mysteriously missing from the entire proceedings — James Chancellor, the fingerprint expert from Jackson. Book Roberts had been quoted as saying that Chancellor stood firm by his findings and would testify at trial. But the prosecution never called him. Roberts also claimed to have brought Maurice O’Neill to Natchez to “check and re-check” Chancellor’s work and that all would be revealed at the time of trial. O’Neill did testify, but as Zaida Wells later wrote, “He talked bullets, but never fingerprints.” So where was the Bertillon expert from Jackson?
James Chancellor was subpoenaed as a defense witness but never appeared in court. On November 22, just three days before Emily Burns’s trial, Clifford Fields, the circuit clerk of Adams County, sent a letter and subpoena to the sheriff of Hinds County to summon Chancellor to Natchez. “The attorneys requesting this subpoena could not recall Mr. Chancellor’s first name,” he wrote, “but he is the gentleman who took fingerprints in the ‘Miss Merrill Murder Case.’” How was it that Emily’s attorneys did not know Chancellor’s first name given the publicity surrounding his visit? Better yet, why had they not simply made a phone call to Sheriff Roberts and ask?29
The trial began three days later and there was no sign of Chancellor, so Emily’s attorneys filed an affidavit to continue the trial at a later date. Emily was sworn in to defend the motion for continuance. The motion stated that her court-appointed attorney Wilfred Geisenberger had requested that the circuit clerk of Adams County issue a subpoena for “Mr. ______ Chancellor, a fingerprint expert of Jackson, Mississippi.” As far as she knew, the “subpoena was issued . . . but never returned,” but her attorneys believed he “can be found and required to attend this trial as a witness in her behalf.”30
The prosecution claimed that the lamp found on Merrill’s property was the same lamp taken from her home and the same one the defendant had carried. But since Chancellor had developed fingerprints from the lamp, Geisenberger wanted him there. He considered him a critical defense witness, because his testimony would show “that fingerprints he discovered and identified” on the lamp “bore no fingerprints of the defendant.” Rather, “he obtained fingerprints and positively identified them as Richard Dana’s, [based on] certain other articles in the Merrill home.”31
The affidavit concluded that Emily Burns “is without any means whereby to obtain the presence of witnesses in her behalf and has done all that she could to have the process of this Court produce them in her behalf at this trial, and that she has used every diligence and means at her command to obtain the presence of this witness.” Emily’s motion for continuance was denied. Yet her affidavit made it clear why the state’s attorneys never called Chancellor to testify. They were there to convict Emily Burns, not Dick Dana or Octavia Dockery.32
The last witness in the trial was Emily Burns, who took the stand in her own defense. She declared that she was not guilty of murder and that the story she told was based on what she had read in the newspapers. She repudiated all of her confessions and said she made them because she was “afraid.” She told jurors how she was “questioned continually by two, three,” and sometimes “five persons,” and it made her so nervous, she said, “I did not know what I was saying.” She testified that on the night of her original confession, “Mr. John Junkin took me in a room where I saw a whip and he told me he was going to give me thirty minutes to tell the truth,” after which she said, “I did not want to be whipped.” This, she said, is when she “confessed” to being at the Merrill home and implicated Pinkney Williams, Ed Newell, Dick Dana, and Octavia Dockery.33
While on the stand, Emily also denied ever leaving the home she shared with her mother on the day of the murder. She stated that “[Pink] left her home on Monday morning before the murder” and that “he left town before the murder.” She then testified that after reading the newspaper detailing Dana and Dockery’s arrest, she “put them in the story” when she told officers. She added Ed Newell to it “because the officers wanted him in it, and she was afraid not to do what they wanted.” When asked about the details of her conversation with Reverend Anderson, she replied that since the sheriff was present at the time, “she thought she had better do what the officers wanted her to do.”34
On cross-examination, she cast doubt on her reenactment of the crime. She claimed that she was “guided” by what she had read in the newspapers and “by talk of the men present who led the way from place to place.” Those present included
not only Sheriff Roberts and former sheriff Abbott but also Duncan Minor, all of whom were present the evening the investigation began. Finally, she reiterated that she was not at the Merrill home on the night of the murder and that she made up her statements to officers.35
What becomes clear in Emily Burns’s testimony is the absolute terror she felt during the previous three months of her life, from the time Pink left town, to her arrest ten days later, to her incarceration, interrogation, and indictment for murder. As she took the stand in her own defense, all she could see were white faces. The jury, the judge, the attorneys, and the stream of officers who took the stand were all white men. And throughout the courtroom were the faces of local whites who came in part for the spectacle, but also to see her convicted.
Nearly four months had led to this — a trial to determine her guilt or innocence and whether she lived or died, and it concluded in less than a day and a half. The jury left the courtroom with its instructions a little before 11:00 A.M. while Emily waited on its decision with her attorneys.
Zaida Wells, who attended the trial, had mounting doubts about the outcome. Her interest in the case began the night she walked out of the Baker-Grand Theatre and saw the frenzy of activity outside the Adams County jail. It bothered her and others in the community that the case rested on only parts of Emily Burns’s confession while it ignored those parts that implicated Dick Dana, Octavia Dockery, and even Edgar Newell. “Common sense seems to dictate that it was either all true,” she wrote, “or else if part of it was lies, the whole of it was lies.”36
The state provided the jury with several instructions, most of which required jurors to “believe from the evidence in this case beyond a reasonable doubt that Lawrence (Pinckney) [sic] Williams alias George Pearls and Emily Burns conspired together to rob or burglarize the home of Jane Surget Merrill” and that Pearls killed Merrill. The instructions further asked that even if the jurors believed the evidence proved “that Emily Burns was on the outside of the house and not actually in the immediate presence of the deceased when [she] was shot,” they should find her guilty of being an accessory to the murder.37
Jurors were also instructed to determine, beyond a reasonable doubt, if she conspired with Pearls to rob Jennie Merrill prior to their going to Glenburnie. If so, the instructions read, “Emily Burns is guilty of the crime of murder as a principal the same as though she had actually fired the shot which killed and murdered the said Jane Surget Merrill.” If they believed she “aided, assisted and encouraged George Pearls or any other person or persons in murdering Jane Surget Merrill,” then she should be found guilty “as such other person or persons.” If it “was her intent to aid and abet” Pearls, then, once again, she should be found “as guilty as the one who did the killing.”38
The state submitted two other instructions intended to offset any doubts jurors might have regarding Emily’s guilt or innocence. One advised the jury “that the law does not require you to know that the defendant is guilty, before you return a verdict of guilty as charged, but only that you should believe her guilty, beyond all reasonable doubt arising out of the evidence.” The other dealt directly with the defense Wilfred Geisenberger had presented. It read that “in the prosecution for a homicide, where the defense is insanity, total or partial, the test of the Defendant’s criminal responsibility, is her ability, at the time she is proved to have committed the act, to recognize her ability to distinguish right from wrong.”39
Geisenberger submitted a number of jury instructions as well, intending to remind jurors of Emily Burns’s legal rights and protections if the state had not proven her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, the state had the burden of proof, and the defendant “is at no time required to prove her innocence . . . [because] the presumption of innocence is a protection, which the law gives this defendant.” If the state failed, then the jury must return a verdict of “not guilty.” The defense also instructed the jury not to disregard Emily Burns’s testimony “because she is the defendant,” that it was their duty to consider her testimony among all the other evidence, and that, based on her testimony, if there was a “probability of her innocence,” they should acquit her.40
Based on his line of questioning in the case, Geisenberger also instructed the jury to consider “whether or not the confessions of the defendant were freely and voluntarily made by her, without fear of punishment . . . by any of the officers to whom or in whose presence they were made.” In doing so, he reminded them that Emily Burns testified to confessing out of her fear of being whipped. If they believed her, then they should find her “not guilty.” In addition, he asked the jury to acquit his client if there was a reasonable doubt that she was there when Pearls killed Jennie Merrill, as she testified to being home that evening. Finally, he reminded the men that if “a single member of the jury [who] entertains in his mind a reasonable doubt as to the defendant’s guilt, then it is the duty of such juror to vote for the acquittal” of Emily Burns. Geisenberger also asked the jury to “disregard and ignore the alleged confessions of the defendant” and not take them into consideration as part of the evidence in the case. It was the one instruction Judge Corban refused.41
The jurors also received instructions about their verdict, too. If they found her “guilty as charged,” which the state called for, then Emily would be sentenced to hang. The jurors could also reach a verdict of manslaughter, in which case she would be sentenced to the state penitentiary “for a term of years, not to exceed twenty years.” They might also find her guilty and “fix her punishment at life in the State penitentiary.” And, should they find her not guilty on the grounds of insanity, then Judge Corban would determine whether she was a danger to the community and could have her “confined in one of the State asylums for the insane.”42
In the end, the attorneys spent more time drafting instructions than the jury spent deliberating. The men returned to the courtroom after less than thirty minutes.
When Judge Corban asked for the jury’s decision, the foreman returned to the judge a small piece of paper with the jury’s verdict written in pencil. Corban read the decision in quiet before telling Emily Burns to stand and face the jury. By all accounts, she remained calm as she received her sentence, which she knew could be death. Then the foreman spoke. “We, the Jury, find the Defendant Emily Burns, guilty as charged, but certify that we cannot agree on the punishment.” They could neither agree to sentence her to death nor to the state penitentiary. Some of them may have wanted the death penalty while others had been swayed by Wilfred Geisenberger’s pleas for mercy. In the event of a verdict where jurors were unable to determine punishment, Mississippi law fixed the punishment at life at the state penitentiary.43
Sheriff’s deputies escorted Emily back across the street to her cell in the Adams County jail to await her sentencing, which was set for Monday, just two days later.44
Newspapers across the country reported on Emily Burns’s conviction, but the Times-Picayune made clear the tragedy that had befallen her. “For an alleged conspiracy to rob an aristocratic old lady recluse who hardly kept a dollar in money at her house,” the paper reported, “Emily Burns, a negro rooming house keeper of Natchez, must go to the penitentiary for life.” That the paper used the word “alleged” signaled what many throughout the area were coming to believe: Emily Burns was headed to prison for a crime that she had not conspired to commit.45
On Monday, November 28, Emily Burns was once again escorted across the street to the Adams County Courthouse, where she and nine others whose trials were held during this term of the circuit court were to be sentenced. Before imposing her sentence, Judge Corban told Emily that he believed she “had committed the crime through bad company” and then asked if she wished to make a statement. She did. “I am not guilty,” she said, “but so long as the jury has found this verdict, I ask the mercy of the court.” And with that, the next words she heard were “Emily Burns, you are hereby sentenced to serve the rest of your natural life in the
state penitentiary.”46
The woman whom friends and family called “Sister” had been in the Adams County jail since mid-August. Her trial moved so swiftly she barely had a chance to process what was happening to her. She did not kill Jennie Merrill, but she was convicted as if she had. Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery were just as guilty, if not more so, and yet they were set free. They were there the night when it all went wrong. But having grown up in Natchez, Sister understood that the life of a Negro was dispensable. Now she knew it firsthand, as she sat in her cell bearing the weight of a life sentence.
In her one last week there before beginning her incarceration at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, known as Parchman, no evidence exists to suggest that she had any visitors. The following Monday, December 5, the prison’s traveling sergeant, Chester Tullos, arrived in Natchez to escort her and seven others to the penitentiary. In addition to Emily Burns, one other woman and six men, only two of whom were white, had also been sentenced to prison. After being shackled in leg cuffs and linked by the long chain that kept prisoners together, Sister and the others shuffled slowly out of the Adams County jail and stepped up into the paddy wagon. As traveling sergeant, Tullos drove to local jails to pick up prisoners headed to Sunflower County. It was a fairly routine job, but it was not without its risks. Five months after he made the trip to Adams County, two prisoners he picked up in Hattiesburg overpowered a fellow officer, took his gun, and shot and killed Tullos, escaping with the paddy wagon. Their desire to avoid Parchman’s brutality was that strong.47
Sister had probably never been outside of Adams County, having lived her entire life to that point in Natchez, much of it at the corner of St. Catherine Street and Cedar Alley. She was just thirty-seven years old. A widow, she was a poor woman by any definition. She had worked hard as a laundress for much of her life — a life that had dealt her a tough hand. Now as she sat in the back of the paddy wagon bouncing along rough roads on her way to the prison farm in the Delta, Sister knew it was only going to get worse.