by Karen L. Cox
The following morning, attorneys for Glenwood’s residents lost their bid for a continuance. Certainly, the reasons for their motion were legitimate. They had only just entered the civil case and needed simultaneously to prepare to defend Dana and Dockery on the murder charge. They also argued that they would not let their clients testify in the civil suit because “it might be prejudicial to their interests in the forthcoming murder trial.”21
Attorneys on both sides clashed bitterly during the hearing, and one particular exchange proved revelatory. In the midst of their arguments, attorneys for the sheriff disclosed that “not only had the grand jury of the present term of court indicted Dana and Miss Dockery on charges of murder” but a previous grand jury had as well. This was an explicit reference to the November 1932 term of court when Emily Burns was indicted. That grand jury had voted 11–8 to indict Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery as accessories in the murder of Jennie Merrill. And they would have indeed been indicted, if only District Attorney Clay Tucker had not felt there was insufficient evidence to try the case. Book had grudgingly agreed with Tucker not to indict the pair at that time, which he likely regretted, given the present circumstances.22
Judge Corban had heard enough. He dismissed the civil suit against Sheriff Roberts and then set the date for The State v. Octavia Dockery and Richard Dana for the following Wednesday.
Goat Castle’s residents had to spend only one night in jail as two men stepped forward to pay their bond — William Logan and Isaac Zerkowsky. It was an odd coincidence that these particular men lent their assistance. A year earlier, Logan was one of Emily Burns’s court-appointed attorneys. And Zerkowsky? He was one of Glenwood’s mortgage holders. This was an interesting development, since Dick and Octavia were already indebted to him. They had been, and continued to be, squatters on the run-down estate, even while they collected admissions. Perhaps he helped pay their bond in order to legally protect his title to the property. Either way, Dick and Octavia walked out of jail a day after their arrest and promptly went to lunch at a “restaurant in a leading hotel,” very likely the Hotel Eola. This time they were reluctant to speak to journalists except to say that they had been well treated while in jail and that the sheriff had sent a physician to see about Octavia, “who was slightly ill from the nervous reaction” to her arrest.23
Criminal cases were on the docket of the next week’s circuit court. In an odd coincidence, another familiar face from the Merrill murder investigation was on trial the same week as Dick and Octavia. That Monday John Geiger, the man who had rented the Skunk’s Nest from them and whose overcoat made him the subject of intense interrogation, was scheduled to go before Judge Corban for “desertion of children.” His bad luck, and association with Goat Castle, seemed to never end.24
As Wednesday approached, there was already speculation that the court would have difficulty seating a jury to try the case against Dana and Dockery. DA Clay Tucker hinted that he planned on bringing in a “witness from the state penitentiary,” an obvious reference to Emily Burns. Surprisingly, Octavia had nothing to say. But Dick Dana, who loved to chat with the press, made a surprisingly lucid statement. “Our case is in the hands of our attorneys and . . . we will abide by whatever they think best,” he said. “We are anxious for the trial to be held and to get it over with.”25
When Wednesday arrived, Dick and Octavia’s attorneys filed, and received, a motion for severance to allow the two to be tried separately. Octavia’s trial was scheduled first, for the following Monday. Her attorneys also succeeded in having Book Roberts temporarily removed from his duties as sheriff, citing his personal interest in the case. Because the sheriff issued subpoenas for trial witnesses, there was concern that his “bias and prejudice” against the defendant might be damaging to her case. Judge Corban appointed Ned Smith, the county coroner, to serve as acting sheriff for the duration of the trial.26
While those motions were successful, Octavia’s attorneys failed in their motion to strike the names of George Pearls and Emily Burns from the indictment against her. They argued that since Pearls was now dead and Emily had already been convicted as an accessory and sent to prison, “no good can be accomplished” by the inclusion of their names and that doing so was “highly and improperly prejudicial” to their client. It went without saying that Octavia did not want her name associated with two guilty “negroes.” Nonetheless, the indictment remained as written for her upcoming trial.27
Sheriff Roberts reopened the case, he said, because of “secret new evidence” that he had acquired since the fall of 1932. But it was not that simple. Dick and Octavia’s attorneys were probably right to suggest that he had a personal interest in the outcome of the case, especially on the heels of their civil suit. “I’m anxious to have the case reopened,” he told a New Orleans reporter, adding, “I’m tired of those people making money and getting all this publicity at my expense.”28
Natchez, the Times Picayune reported, awaited Roberts’s revelations “with a sort of exasperated eagerness,” because they thought the “airing of skeletons in the ‘Goat Castle’ imbroglio was over.” People in town, it seemed, had grown weary of the whole affair. They were “never fond of the sensational publicity” and wanted it all to go away. Yet, a woman was murdered, and members of her family — it was never disclosed who — still sought justice, enough that they retained former district attorney Bob Bennett, known as a relentless prosecutor, to assist the state’s attorneys.29
Several of the witnesses from Emily Burns’s trial were subpoenaed to return for Dockery’s trial, including Maurice O’Neill, Duncan Minor, Edgar “Poe” Newell, Zula Curtis, and several officers. Emily Burns, too, was brought back from Parchman to serve as a witness for both the state and the defense. There was an additional black witness, Richard Blanton, whose name was never mentioned until this trial but whom the defense planned to call to offer Octavia an alibi. According to her, the two were engaged in an argument that lasted until well after the time of Jennie Merrill’s murder, even though in her civil suit she alleged she had retired to Glenwood for the evening when shots were fired.30
On the day of her trial, Octavia headed into town two hours early to confer with her attorneys. She wore a black coat with a fur collar, a navy-blue felt hat, a blue dress with a blue and white matching scarf, and brown shoes. Dick showed up later, closer to the time of the trial, wearing a gray suit, a striped shirt, and a “peacock-blue silk tie.” In his pocket appeared to be a new pen and pencil set. His hair was neatly cut, and his “wild man” whiskers had been traded in for a “Vandyke” beard. He refused offers for a ride into town, he said, and called a taxi because he “had plenty of money now that people were paying to look [at] Goat Castle.”31
The courtroom was packed for The State v. Octavia Dockery. Acting sheriff Ned Smith even “placed extra seats in the courtroom for women attending the trial” whose constitutions were clearly strong enough to hear the grotesque details of not only the murder but also Goat Castle. Many of them remained curious as to how Octavia Dockery went from the “charmed, cultured girl” to the “Goat Woman.” Dick Dana’s appearance and behavior could be dismissed, but “no one has ever suggested that her mind went to pieces with the years,” a reporter noted.32
Octavia and Dick both gave statements to the press as they headed into court. “It’s ridiculous to charge us with this murder,” she said. “I worked hard that day and was awakened by the shots, but I paid no attention as I thought some of our Negro neighbors were having domestic troubles,” she said, declaring, “We feel confident we will be acquitted.” Dana, too, felt that they would be “free of charges for this murder.” He told reporters, “Of course, I heard the shots, and started to go out, but Miss Dockery told me it was probably just some Negroes fighting, so we didn’t need to leave home.” She may have coached him on what to say, but then Dick, always the performer, improvised. “My only regret,” he said, “is that our lawyers refuse to allow us to be photographed, but I suppose they know what�
��s best.”33
Given the enormous publicity surrounding the case, defense attorneys had requested a special venire of two hundred men to be summoned for possible jury service. Dick sat next to Octavia during jury selection, occasionally stroking his beard and putting on his horn-rimmed glasses to read the newspaper. From time to time, Octavia chatted with “stylishly dressed women who pressed closer to be near her.”34
One by one the men called to jury duty were dismissed. When court adjourned at 6:30 P.M., Judge Corban ordered an additional venire of one hundred men be summoned. Once again, man after man was dismissed. Many of them claimed to have fixed opinions about the case, while others claimed that they were opposed to the death penalty. The latter may have been true, since not even Emily Burns received that sentence. A third reason potential jurors were dismissed was a defense strategy that Dockery’s attorneys hoped would lead to a mistrial — they eliminated men who were delinquent in paying their poll taxes. So often, failure to pay this tax was used to the detriment of black citizenship — to prevent them from voting — but in this case it was applied to poor white men to prevent them from jury service.35
On Tuesday afternoon, after a second day of failing to secure twelve male jurors, Judge Corban called a “cessat” to the proceedings. “As I see it, it is impossible to get a jury in Adams County for the trial in this case,” he said. “The ends of justice must be served,” Corban continued, and “in a murder case it is essential that there be a fair and impartial jury. So much publicity has been given this case, it has been joked about so much and discussed, not only here, but all over the country, that I see no chance of it to go to trial at the present term of circuit court.” The same scenario applied to the case against Dick Dana, so he, too, avoided trial. While a cessat meant that a future court could take up the case, it was very unlikely.36
When the judge declared a mistrial, the court erupted. The Natchez Democrat described it as a “short demonstration on the part of some of the spectators,” but the Times Picayune correspondent Gwen Bristow, who had always provided more detailed accounts of the case, described it differently. “Thunderous applause greeted [Judge Corban’s] announcement,” which, she noted, “court officials tried in vain to stop.” After the announcement, moreover, a “throng pressed around Dana and Miss Dockery to offer congratulations, making it impossible for some minutes for persons in the front of the courtroom to leave their places.”37
As Octavia Dockery left the Adams County Courthouse and headed back to Glenwood, she called the trial a “farce” and asked that she and Dick be left in peace. Book Roberts did not speak to the press. His “secret new evidence” would never be heard. Not to be outdone, Octavia had one more surprise for him. Less than ten days after the mistrial, she appealed the dismissal of her civil suit against the sheriff to the Mississippi Supreme Court.38
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LONGING FOR HOME
Emily Burns arrived at the Mississippi State Penitentiary on the afternoon of December 5, 1932. Nervous and afraid, she was taken from the paddy wagon to a room where she waited for a white woman named Ola Mae Spickard, the prison registrar, to call her name. Spickard had registered thousands of convicts since she began working at Parchman in 1907, a year after it opened. Emily Burns would be one of her last before retirement, and yet hers was just another face whose humanity went unnoticed as Spickard filled out the cards for the more than one hundred men and women who entered prison that day.1
When Sister stepped forward, Spickard jotted down her crime and sentence: Murder. Life. County of conviction: Adams. Then she filled in the blanks that detailed Sister’s identity, appearance, and background. Name: Emily Burns. Age: 37. Height and weight: 5’1” and 105 lbs. Hair: Black. Eyes: Black. Complexion: Brown. Face: Oval. Mouth: Large. Teeth: Good. Nose: Small. Eyebrows: Medium. Education in years: 5th grade. Her closest living relative was her mother, Nellie Black. Her most recent occupation was listed as “maid.” Spickard also recorded her religion — Baptist. Sister and her family were longtime members of Antioch Baptist Church, but on this day she joined a different kind of congregation, becoming Convict No. 7290.2
The overwhelming majority of prisoners at Parchman were black men, and the majority of women who were incarcerated there were also black. On the same day Emily Burns entered the penitentiary, Ethel Reed, a twenty-three-year-old black farm laborer, also from Natchez, began her one-year sentence for robbery. They joined other women, black and white, who only recently arrived to serve their sentences. They included Pearly Love, a seventeen-year-old black housemaid sentenced to seven months for burglary, and Mary Jernigan, a twenty-seven-year-old white woman who received a five-year sentence as an accessory to murder, as opposed to Emily’s life sentence for the same conviction. There was also a forty-three-year-old white housekeeper named Mary Bowers, who willingly pled guilty to killing her husband and brother-in-law. She fed them both poisoned biscuits because the latter had “paid too much attention to her daughter from a previous marriage.” All told, sixty-six women were incarcerated that year — a number that fluctuated to as high as eighty over the next decade. All of them, except for the white women assigned to the superintendent’s home or perhaps a sergeant’s home, were placed in Camp 13 — the Women’s Camp.3
Parchman. Just the name conjured images of a wretched place. Nearly sixteen thousand acres in size, it functioned like the antebellum plantations of a century earlier. This was the plan. Governor James K. Vardaman regarded the penal farm in the Mississippi Delta as the perfect place to discipline black criminals and teach them to respect white authority. It had opened in 1906, and he kept his promise by sending prisoners there from the old state penitentiary in Jackson, where they were put to work like their slave ancestors. Thousands of acres were given to planting cotton. They raised cattle and hogs, which were then slaughtered and used to feed prisoners. There was a small canning factory for putting up the vegetables — mostly peas and corn — and a sewing room, where female prisoners made the striped convict clothing known as the “ring arounds” and the “up and downs.”4
Women like Sister did it all — picked cotton, slaughtered hogs, canned food, and sewed stripes, bed ticking, and cotton sacks. She worked six days a week. Her day began at 4:30 when Rubin Sledge, the sergeant for the women’s camp, rapped a stick on the iron bed she slept in to wake her. The days were twelve hours long, and the lights went out at 8:30 P.M. It was hard labor, day in and day out, and there was no rest but Sunday rest. Some women worked that day, too, in a desperate effort to shorten their sentences, because even though it was the Lord’s Day, Parchman was a godforsaken place.5
Entering the penitentiary at any time in the Jim Crow era would have been difficult, but Emily Burns’s incarceration began during one of the prison’s most troubled periods. The Great Depression wreaked havoc on the prison budget at a time when the number of prisoners was growing exponentially. O. G. Tann, the prison superintendent, tried desperately to convince the penitentiary board that conditions on the farm were dire. In the midst of the economic downturn, the prison population had grown, on average, 20 percent each year. But even with this growth, the state cut the prison budget in 1932 by 40 percent. Tann warned not only of overcrowding but also of the poor condition of the wooden dormitories that were “old” and “hard to keep clean and sanitary.” He described one of the camps as a “regular firetrap.” The one physician assigned to look after thousands of prisoners’ health expressed concern over a malaria outbreak that had also caused overcrowding in the prison hospital.6
Emily Burns worked long hours in the Parchman prison sewing room during the eight years of her incarceration. This photo was taken in the 1930s during the time she served. (Courtesy of the Archives and Records Services Division, Mississippi Department of Archives & History, Jackson.)
From its inception, Parchman was intended to be a self-sustaining operation through sales of cotton and growing the food necessary to feed prisoners. The fact that thousands of African Amer
icans were sick and dying did not seem to matter much to the state legislature. Tann’s efforts to restore the budget fell on deaf ears, so conditions in the camps got a lot worse before they got better. The little shacks that Sister knew along St. Catherine Street in Natchez might have been poorly maintained, but they were far better than her new accommodations.
Eight months after she arrived, Emily Burns got word that she was needed back in Natchez, but it was no homecoming. She would have to stay in a cell at the same Adams County jail where she had spent nearly four months before going to the penitentiary. Attorneys wanted her as a witness in the trial of Octavia Dockery. What could she say beyond what she had said at her own trial? Miss Dockery was there when Jennie Merrill was murdered. So was Mr. Dana. Yet she never got to testify in 1933 and tell the court once more what she knew to be true. There would be no trial, and the Goat Woman remained free.
Sister returned to Parchman, where the women had the blues as bad as the men. They sang about them, too. They had the “Long Line Blues,” from working what seemed like unending rows of cotton they were forced to pick. Their blues spoke of homesickness, of being separated from their mothers, of feeling alone and friendless. No doubt Sister felt all of it. One of the women she knew from the Women’s Camp, Fanny Walden, wrote a blues poem called “My Prison Life” that was close to her own experience in Adams County. Walden had also been convicted of murder, and her poem told a story that Sister knew all too well — about a swift trial, longing for home and family, and the awful day she left for prison when “the Long Chain Man appeared,” shackled her, and took her to the penitentiary. Then there was the fear she felt that day she first saw the place where she was sentenced to spend the rest of her life.