by Alex Heard
During Keeton’s trial, Collins was given time to solicit expert opinion on her mental state. But McGee’s sanity hearing had to happen immediately, using only the witnesses at hand. None were psychiatrists or psychologists, and most had already prejudged McGee as being both sane and guilty. Horace McRae, Laurel’s postmaster, said McGee had worked for him and his brothers for several years, and that he saw McGee in the Hinds County jail during his monthlong incarceration. He agreed with Homer Pittman’s suggestion that his behavior in court was some of kind of “horse play.”
Robert B. Taylor, a captain in the guard unit that transported McGee, had watched him at the jail too. He said McGee responded to orders “just like a mule heading for his stall when you turn him aloose.”
“Do you think he is feigning over there now, or what we call horse play?” Pittman asked.
“He is putting on a pretty good act, sir.”
The Reverend M. L. Davis, a preacher from Jackson who had conducted a worship service with Hinds County prisoners, said McGee seemed to comprehend the words of the hymns they sang. “On…the song of ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’—I am a vocalist myself…I noticed the movement of the cords of his throat and the movement of his lips as he hummed and sang part of the song….”
“From your observation there,” Pittman said, “tell the court and jury whether or not he knew what was going on then.”
“Sure, he knew what was going on.”
The only witness to take McGee’s side was his mother, Bessie, who said she’d seen him upset in the past, but not like this. “I never have seen him in that shape before and I been knowing him ever since he been in the world,” she said. “…I know he is easy to get upset, especially if white folks are around him. If you scold him the least bit he goes all over himself, but I never seen him in the shape he’s in now—not like he is now.
“To my notion,” she said, “he been over there in jail and just sat there and stayed worried until he just about done lost his mind. That’s my notion.”
Pittman wasn’t interested in her notions. “Aunty, you say you don’t know yourself?”
“No, sir, I don’t know myself.”
“That’s the truth about it, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, when a fellow don’t know, he just don’t know.”
McGee was pronounced sane and fit for trial.
Willette Hawkins was put on the stand first, after Judge Collins, honoring her request, cleared the courtroom of spectators and reporters. There was no description in the local newspaper stories about her demeanor, clothing, or physical appearance, but the jury must have been struck by how thin she was. Mrs. Hawkins was five feet eight inches tall, but she weighed only around ninety-two pounds at the time of the rape, a result of chronically poor health that, she said, had nagged her since she’d been married.
She was thirty-two when she testified the first time. She had dark hair and beautiful eyes—big, dark irises under narrow, arching eyebrows. In a photo taken around the time of her high school graduation, she looked happy, pretty, and perfectly relaxed. Three children, a dozen years, and the strain of recent weeks had probably added a few stress lines to her appearance.
Pittman started with basic questions, and Mrs. Hawkins mentioned that she’d resided in Laurel most of her life, not counting “the two years we were in Indiana.” Pittman didn’t ask when those two years were—as far as he knew, there was no need, but, much later, that information would turn out to be important. Instead, he moved straight to her account of the rape. She described the circumstances of that night—the sick baby, Troy’s retreat to a back room—along with the layout of her bedroom at the front of the house, her various actions before falling asleep, and the moment when she woke up and sensed that somebody was in the room with her.
“I heard something crawling along by the bed whispering, and I thought, ‘My goodness, what could this be? Has Troy lost his mind?’ Because no other man had ever been in the house and the doors were locked, I felt sure, and I just never dreamed of such a thing, just imagine. And I smelled whiskey, or I smelled beer or something, and I said, ‘That’s not Troy,’ and I reached out and I said, ‘Oh, Troy, what do you want?’ and I put my hand on a bushy Negro head….”
She went on, saying that she saw the man on his hands and knees but couldn’t see his face. She reached for a bedside lamp but he told her not to bother—he’d broken the electrical line at the back of the house. She asked what he wanted and he told her in the crudest terms.
“Miss, Miss, I come for you,” he said. “I want your pussy and I am going to have it.” When she said “no, no,” he told her to shut up or he would cut her throat.
“I was just scared to death, that’s all, not so much for myself,” she said. “If he had killed me, I never would have felt it, because I was just petrified. But I had that baby, my two-year-old baby girl in the bed with me, and in the next room my two little girls, one eight and one ten…and I didn’t know what he would do to them or what he would do to the baby, and he said ‘shut your mouth’ every time I called Troy. I called him, not loud, because I didn’t want to wake the children up in the next room, and I didn’t know but what he had already killed Troy. And when I called Troy, he said, ‘He’s back there asleep, Miss.’ I said, ‘Why did you come here?” And he said, ‘I came to fuck you.’ Well, then, I thought, ‘Well, if that’s all I can take it.’”
Pittman said, “Mrs. Hawkins, he told you what he came for, and then did he rape you?”
“Yes, and all the time he was there, he was talking, talking, whispering to me, telling me what he wanted to do and what he was going to do, and he did it, he did it all.”
A few questions later, Pittman asked if it were true that she was menstruating that night. “I was,” she said. “It was right about the end of my period. I was not menstruating a great deal, but I had to take that off, and he mentioned that.”
“He mentioned that?”
“He said, ‘You lied to me, why did you lie to me? Why did you tell me that lie?’ And he was laying up there, just as if he was—”
“He finally, though, penetrated your female organs with his male organ? He did that?”
“Yes….”
Toward the end, she described a vow the rapist extracted from her once he was through. “He said, ‘Will you promise me—all I want now is one thing. I want you to promise me you will never tell it.’” She agreed, but he emphasized how serious he was, threatening her again.
“If you never tell it, things will be all right,” he said. “[O]therwise, I will cut your head off. I won’t just cut your throat, I will cut your head off.”
She promised and he finally left. Moving silently, she found her way back to Troy’s room, woke him, and said, “Troy, get up, wake up. The worst thing in the world that ever happened has happened to me.”
There were only two other witnesses whose testimony touched on the rape itself: Troy Hawkins and Dr. Grady Cook, a Hattiesburg physician. It would be said in coming years that, suspiciously, Mrs. Hawkins was never examined by a doctor. But unless Dr. Cook was lying on the stand, that was untrue. He owned a small private hospital in Hattiesburg called the South Mississippi Infirmary, which is where Mrs. Hawkins was kept under sedation for a week. On the stand, he sounded credible, reporting what he observed and nothing more. A pelvic exam, he said, had revealed “some minor, slight abrasions of the lining of the vagina.”
“To the layman that would be what we call bruises?” Easterling asked.
“Scratches, you might say. Little pieces of tissue were scratched off of the surface.” Dr. Cook said he made a slide and saw live spermatozoa, but he had no way of knowing where they originated. For all he knew, they could have come from Troy. He stopped short of declaring that Mrs. Hawkins had been raped. “I know that some trauma had occurred in the vagina,” he said. “I don’t know how the trauma occurred nor how the cells got there.”
Troy testified too, describing the moment when Willette woke him
up. In this trial, neither of them said much about what they did immediately after Troy came to—that happened in later trials—but he did touch on the mysterious matter of the lights, which weren’t working when he got up. As he explained, a single wire came in from a back-alley utility pole, was fastened to the eave of the house, dropped down, and went through the edge of the siding boards into a switch box.
“Where was the wire broken?” Pittman asked.
“Where it fastened to the wire going to the alley,” Troy said. “It was the little short wire that went down to the house.”
The point was that this wire was something an intruder could break rather than cut, and that a man on an impromptu mission to commit a rape could have simply jimmied it. He wouldn’t have had to think ahead to bring a wire-cutting tool.
That was it in terms of proving that a rape had happened, and the weaknesses in the case were obvious. Mrs. Hawkins hadn’t seen the rapist’s face—all she knew was that he was black and that he smelled like alcohol. Despite the Leader-Call story that said evidence had been shipped to an FBI lab, no forensic evidence was introduced that tied any individual to the crime. There was a confession, but anybody familiar with Mississippi justice had to figure that beatings and coercion came into play.
The remainder of the prosecution’s case consisted of testimony from eleven witnesses, including two African-American friends of McGee. The prosecution used them to lay out a circumstantial case that McGee was drunk that night, had lost money gambling, and appeared to be in the vicinity at the time of the rape.
After Troy Hawkins, the next witness was Harold Elliot, a white manager with the Laurel Wholesale Grocery Company. Elliot said that, as of Thursday, November 1, McGee had been working there for only four days as a delivery driver. He was driving a “1941 ton-and-a-half Ford truck with a stake body” with a sign on the side that said LAUREL WHOLESALE GROCERY. After his rounds on Thursday, McGee didn’t come back in the evening. Elliot said he next saw him at 6:10 a.m. on Friday, in the company parking lot, asleep in the truck cab.
Tal Porter, a black employee of the company, testified that he saw McGee that morning just after 7 a.m., near a bus station.
“I asked him where he was going,” Porter said, “and he said he had to run to the house a minute, and I turned around and said, ‘You haven’t messed up none of the boss’s money have you?’ And he said, “No, I’ll be back in a few minutes.’” He didn’t come back, so Elliot called Wayne Valentine to report the theft of company cash.
Where had McGee been? Two acquaintances, Bill Barnes and George Walker, testified that they’d been with him during a long night of driving, drinking, and gambling. Barnes said that on Thursday afternoon he’d helped McGee do some unloading before they knocked off and bought a half-pint of bootleg whiskey in Laurel. Soon they hit the highway, heading west and driving around in the vicinity of small towns like Hot Coffee, Mt. Olive, Mize, and Collins. They were looking for McGee’s “daddy-in-law,” Joe Payton, and his brother-in-law, Johnny Payton. Barnes said they made two more stops to buy whiskey and a fourth when they returned to Laurel after 11 p.m.
At 11:20 p.m., at a cafe on Pine Street, they ran into George Walker, a Masonite employee who was “eating lunch” after his 3–11 shift. They drove to a house in a black part of Laurel called Queensburg and found a game.
“Did you gamble with Willie that night?” Easterling asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Did he have any money?”
“Yes, sir, he had money. After he got broke he said, ‘George, lend me some money until tonight. I had $15.35 of the company’s money.’” Walker gave him a few bucks and they went to a house in “the K.C.”—the K.C. Bottom, a tough neighborhood near the railroad tracks—where he won some of his cash back. Walker walked home by himself at 3:00. Barnes said McGee dropped him near his house at 3:45. McGee then drove up Masonite Drive and back toward town.
Boyd cross-examined Barnes, asking several inconclusive questions about a woman named Hettie or Hattie Johnson. According to Barnes, her house at 424 East Oak Street was the last place they’d gambled that night.
Nobody saw McGee after that. But two people, both white, said they saw a truck that fit the description of the Laurel Wholesale Grocery vehicle. Rose Marie Imbragulio, a young woman who lived with her parents a block away from the Hawkins home, was up, as usual, by 4:30, getting ready to go to work at her father’s business. On her way out, she said, she “heard a lot of noise before I opened the door, and when I opened the door, I saw the truck….” She didn’t see the person driving it or the company name on the side, only that it had “a built-up body.”
Paul Britton, who worked the night shift at a filling station on Ellisville Boulevard, a main drag parallel to Magnolia Street, said he saw a “Laurel Wholesale Grocery truck, stake body” go by at a few minutes past 5:00. But it was too dark to see the driver.
Much of the case hinged on these two sightings, but the bottom line was that nobody inside or near the Hawkins home was able to positively identify McGee as the man at the scene.
McGee was arrested on Saturday, November 3, at around 2:40 p.m. in downtown Hattiesburg. Based on Elliot’s phone call, Valentine had put out a bulletin that went all over Mississippi and into Louisiana. Hattiesburg policeman Hugh Herring testified that he and a patrolman named E. C. Harris were parked on South Main Street when they saw a man who matched McGee’s description.
They followed him on foot for a few paces and then Harris sneaked up and quietly said, “Willie.” McGee jumped, so they grabbed him and took him in. Both Herring and Hattiesburg police chief M. M. Little testified that McGee looked scared, like a man who had something to hide.
“I told Willie what he was charged with and told him Mr. Valentine would be down after him in a very few minutes,” Little said, “and he swallowed two or three times and said, ‘Boss, they got me wrong,’ and perspiration popped out on him, on his face. And I asked him what he was so hot about and he says, ‘Boss, it’s hot back here,’ so I went back to the office and in a few minutes a trusty, a negro boy, came back and reported that this boy was trying to break out of jail….” McGee, he said, was caught clawing at heavy mesh wire on the window of his cell.
Valentine testified next. He began by describing the scene at the Hawkins home on the morning of the crime. After getting a call at 5:30 a.m., he went to the house and saw signs that someone had gone in through a side window. He said the lights were working by the time he arrived. He didn’t say why he came to suspect McGee, only that he’d pursued “every lead I could get hold of” and “finally, I run into this lead on Willie McGee.” After talking to McGee’s employer and getting a report that he had stolen “a zoot suit” from “a negro house,” he put out his bulletin. He said he’d known McGee for more than fifteen years and had never had trouble with him before.
When the call came from Hattiesburg, Valentine drove down with two other officers, Jack Anderson and Jeff Montgomery. Inside the jail, Valentine ordered McGee to drop his pants so he could look at his underwear. “I examined the shorts he had on, and the shorts had what I call blood,” he said. His belief was that McGee’s genitals were stained with Mrs. Hawkins’s menstrual blood, but he never had the blood matched in a lab.
In Valentine’s account—which would be challenged by the defense in the years ahead—McGee confessed voluntarily when they got back to Laurel. At first, he said, McGee reversed the chronology of his whereabouts, saying he’d gambled in Laurel until 2:30 and then cruised around in the country until 6:00.
“I told Willie that I wanted him to tell me the truth,” Valentine said. “If he was the one that done it, just tell me the truth and we would know then—no one was going to harm him, nobody was going to lay a hand on him, it was our duty to protect him and we were going to protect him. And he said he went into the house.”
The officers drove McGee to Magnolia Street, and he showed them where he’d parked. They drove to the next block, parked in front of
the Hawkins home, and McGee pointed to two houses, saying, “It was one of those two.”
In McGee’s written confession, he corroborated the prosecution’s version of his movements. After dropping Barnes, he said, he drove back toward town, drove down Magnolia, and parked “near a stucco house.”
“I got out of the truck, walked back north on South Magnolia Street until I came to a house where I saw a light, and saw a white woman lying on the bed,” his confession said. “I then entered the front door and before I got into the room where the woman was, someone had turned out the lights. I then removed my outer clothes, or coveralls, and then removed my shoes, and got in bed with the woman. I then forcibly assaulted her, or had relations with her, and put on my clothes, [and] got in the truck….
“I don’t remember what I said to the woman, or what she said to me,” he said, “as I was drinking very heavy.”
When you look at the prosecution’s case and McGee’s confession, the dots don’t all connect. It’s a bit unclear from the confession whether McGee stopped and parked because he saw a light or if he parked first and then happened to see a light (and a woman) while walking up the street.
McGee doesn’t mention tampering with the lights, but Troy Hawkins said someone did. However, Valentine said the lights were on when he got there, and at the first trial there was no mention of anybody fixing them. (That would be rectified later, with testimony from a power company repairmen who said he’d performed the job.) Also, Valentine thought the intruder went in through an unlocked window. McGee said he walked through the front door.