He didn’t know it, but the FBI started watching Featherstone in 1967. As the SNCC got bolder, the feds got more interested in Feather. J. Edgar Hoover’s file on him was already a couple of hundred pages in March 1970. They knew that he’d traveled to communist Czechoslovakia in 1968, then later flew to Havana to celebrate the anniversary of Castro’s Cuban revolution.
Just a few weeks before he died, Featherstone had married a teacher who was also active in the movement. Still a newlywed bride, she was now also a widow. A month after the fatal blast, she would scatter his ashes in Lagos, Nigeria.
In life, Featherstone had been a hero to the black community in Washington. In death, he was a martyr. Within hours of the incident, before any details were known, the SNCC issued an angry press release that morning, calling the deaths “vicious murders.” Black neighborhoods around Fourteenth Street started to seethe. Feather was assassinated by the white man, they murmured. They plotted revenge, but Featherstone’s family urged restraint, a calm before any storm.
But a storm was definitely building.
We had identified one of the victims, Ralph Featherstone, but we still didn’t know how and why a bomb might have exploded in or near his car.
If there was any good news amid this grimness, it was that our first victim wasn’t H. Rap Brown. But our second victim, whose damage was far worse, was a much more difficult and dangerous forensic puzzle.
And we didn’t have a good feeling. H. Rap Brown hadn’t been seen since the night before and couldn’t be found anywhere.
* * *
There wasn’t much left of the body on my table.
The blast had amputated both legs below the knees. His right forearm and left hand were also missing. His upper right arm had a nasty fracture from which the humerus protruded at a peculiar angle. His thighs were split like fish up to his crotch, the arteries, skin, and muscle cut to ribbons by the blast. His genitals were gone.
His buttocks and pelvis had literally been blown apart, splitting his lower body in half.
A jagged wound stretched from the pubic area to his breastbone, exposing his pureed intestines and frayed chest muscles, but an odd three- to five-inch band of undamaged skin stretched across his belly. His neck, arms, and chest bore even more deep gashes, although the skin of his back was intact.
His jaw, neck, and pharynx were a bloody pulp. His face was flattened and collapsed; what was left of his skull was in a hundred pieces beneath the skin, like broken marbles in a torn paper bag. His eyeballs had burst in their sockets and dried into crusty shells.
Inside, this man’s heart and lungs had suffered even worse hemorrhages from the blast. His brain was mush.
Most of the damage was to the front of this man’s body.
Like Featherstone, this unfortunate victim had no alcohol or drugs in his system, but X-rays showed something more intriguing: A metallic object embedded in the back of his mouth proved to be a 1.5-volt mercury battery. The films also showed scattered metallic parts—a spring, several rivets, two half-inch-long wires, and many other unidentifiable metal fragments—in his chest and abdomen.
And in a final bit of forensic sleuthing, I found his penis and a flap of his palm in the man’s jumbled intestines.
This victim was found about sixty-three feet from the remnants of the passenger side of the Dart, the opposite direction from driver Featherstone. Taking this location and the nature and distribution of his injuries into account, we deduced this was the passenger.
In the meantime, the FBI’s experts had concluded the bomb had been about ten sticks of dynamite wired to a battery and a key-wound Westclox alarm clock. They identified the clock from tiny pieces found at the scene. The explosion had been so immense that it shook houses two miles away.
We were starting to see what happened.
The bomb couldn’t have been in the glove compartment, under the instrument panel, or under the seat because that didn’t fit the nature of the two men’s injuries. It had to be somewhere near the passenger-side floorboards.
It couldn’t have been planted under the car because the blast pattern, the damage to the chassis, and the angle of the wounds suggested it was inside the car.
It couldn’t have been thrown into the car, crime scene specialists said, because all the windows had been rolled up and Trooper Lastner had seen no other vehicles anywhere on the road that night.
There was only one explanation: The bomb had been on the passenger-side floor, between the legs of our unidentified victim. His grievous injuries suggested he had been leaning over it, possibly with his hands on it, when it exploded.
How did we know? His injuries were symmetrical, proving the blast had been directly in front of him. That strange band of skin across his belly was protected because he had been bent forward, creating a fold of skin across his abdomen. His chin and neck had absorbed the bulk of the blast. And the force had blown his hand and genitals upward into his body.
When the bomb went off, Featherstone’s right hand was on the wheel, and his right side bore the brunt of the explosion.
It all added up to one thing: Featherstone and his still-nameless passenger knew they were carrying a lethal package. They couldn’t have missed it.
Now we knew the driver’s name; we also knew that the bomb was inside the Dodge Dart. We strongly believed these two men were knowingly transporting the bomb when it detonated prematurely. Had they intended to blow up the Bel Air courthouse but were scared off by the enormous police presence there? We still don’t know to this day, but it’s a good theory.
Eager to forestall charges of a cover-up, the Maryland state police publicly revealed what we knew about Featherstone and the bomb’s location, and the reaction was immediate.
“Almost before the wreckage was cool,” responded US representative John Conyers, Jr., a black Michigan Democrat, in a letter signed by twenty of the biggest names in the civil rights movement, “the Maryland authorities were certain they had the answers. Ralph Featherstone, they said, was fooling around with high explosives. Those of us who knew him are sufficiently convinced of his level-headedness to be desirous of a better explanation of his death.”
But a day later, we still didn’t know who Victim No. 2 was.
The FBI was picking up chatter about new violence related to the Bel Air bombing. Brown’s lawyer William Kunstler, a champion of leftist causes, publicly questioned whether the FBI or any other government agency could fairly investigate this tragedy. “I’m always suspicious of the official story,” Kunstler told the Washington Post. Militants openly charged authorities with assassinating innocent Americans. A hungry media was already starting to ask, “Where’s H. Rap Brown?”
Time was running out.
* * *
We worked through the night to identify the nameless man in our morgue.
His own mother wouldn’t have recognized his obliterated face. Other than the obvious damage, he had no identifying scars, deformities, or tattoos. His hands were gone, so there were no fingerprints. We had some teeth, but without some idea of who he was, we’d have no dental records to compare. We had requested dental files for the missing H. Rap Brown but so far, none had been found.
Making matters worse, investigators sifting through the debris found two different identity cards with different names (C. B. Robinson and W. H. Payne), Navy discharge papers for a William Payne, a library card for somebody named Will X., and three photographs bearing three different names—but all showing adult black males consistent with our unknown corpse. (And none were H. Rap Brown.)
Was Brown fleeing prosecution with new identities? Or was our dead man one of several Featherstone friends the FBI couldn’t find? We knew nothing.
While police meticulously scoured the blast site for more clues and started tracing the documents, Dr. Sopher set to a grim task: reconstructing the dead man’s face with its own tissues, hoping to create an accurate enough copy that somebody might recognize him.
The documents yielded o
ur first clue.
The military documents said William H. Payne had enlisted in Covington, Kentucky, and would now be in his mid-twenties, which was consistent with our dead man. The US Navy’s Department of Medical Records rushed Payne’s 1961 medical history to us and we quickly saw that his blood type (O+) matched the corpse.
But the dental records didn’t match. The Navy’s dental X-rays clearly showed five filled cavities in the young sailor’s mouth. Our corpse had only one.
We scratched Payne off our list of possibilities.
Problem was, we were hitting dead ends in our search for C. B. Robinson, and without records that would include or exclude H. Rap Brown, we were dead in the water.
Dr. Sopher’s facial reconstruction was our best bet. Using copper wire and a drill, he pulled the shattered bones of the corpse’s face back into place and wrapped the flensed face around them. We took photos of the new face (shading the areas of the worst damage) and prepared to circulate the pictures in the news media, hoping somebody would step forward with an identity.
But the macabre reconstruction furnished an unexpected benefit: We suddenly noticed a strangely irregular front hairline and random bald patches in the man’s coarse black close-cropped hair.
Comparing our dead man’s hairline to recent photos of Brown, we saw significant differences. And when we compared the distinctive shape of the corpse’s left ear to photos of Brown’s left ear, they didn’t match.
So H. Rap Brown didn’t die in the Bel Air explosion. That relieved a lot of people, but Victim No. 2 was still somebody and it was our job to determine who.
The second morning after the bomb went off, we got a break. A searcher found two small patches of skin at the scene that looked like fingertips. Along with the ragged palm skin that I retrieved from the corpse’s belly, FBI fingerprint analysts came to a disturbing conclusion.
The two bits of skin were actually a man’s right thumb and left pinkie finger.
And they belonged to William H. Payne.
* * *
We were mystified. How could the same man’s fingerprints and dental records be different? Could one or both be wrong? We needed more evidence before we could say that a man named William H. Payne had been blown to bits in Bel Air, possibly by a terror bomb he intended to plant in a very public place.
The personal papers from the wreckage held the key.
The two different identity cards held no obvious clues. The one for C. B. Robinson had a picture, W. H. Payne’s didn’t. The birthdates were similar, but not the same.
Will X.’s library card held no obvious clues either.
But on the back of one of the photos, someone had scrawled the name “Minnie” with an Alabama phone number.
Police detectives called and Minnie answered. She didn’t know anybody named C. B. Robinson or W. H. Payne, but she admitted giving the photograph to her close friend Will X. several months earlier. She said Will always wore a gold earring in his pierced ear. Minnie didn’t know where Will might be now, but she gave the cops a Detroit phone number where he might be reached.
The Detroit number was Will’s employer, who confirmed that Will had been there earlier that same day. A few hours later, Will called the Medical Examiner’s Office with a new piece of the puzzle. He knew W. H. Payne, who’d visited just a few weeks earlier. And the library card and Minnie’s photo had been in his wallet, which he lost around the time Payne was visiting.
When asked to describe his friend Payne, Will said his only physical peculiarities were “a funny forehead hairline” and “patches of baldness.” Not only had we observed the corpse’s irregular hairline and alopecia, but the photo on C. B. Robinson’s identity card showed a similar hairline … but Will X. knew nobody named C. B. Robinson and had never heard Payne mention anybody by that name.
Finally we had somebody who might be able to visually identify our corpse. We believed C. B. Robinson and William H. Payne were probably the same person, but until Will X. looked at the Robinson photo or the dead man’s face, we wouldn’t have solid proof.
In the days before email or even common fax machines, we had to be creative. We asked a newspaper reporter to help us wire a photo to a Detroit TV station, where, at a time prearranged with Will X., the photo would be broadcast. Will X. had instructions to look at it and call us as soon as possible.
Well, it all fell apart in a flurry of technical difficulties, but the photo was published the next morning in the Detroit newspapers, and Will X. positively identified C. B. Robinson’s identity-card photo as his friend William Payne.
Later in that third day since the Bel Air explosion, Payne’s family rushed to Baltimore from Kentucky. They, too, recognized the C. B. Robinson photo before looking at the reconstructed face for a further, conclusive identification. It was definitely their twenty-six-year-old son and brother, William H. Payne.
* * *
Payne and Featherstone were key members of the faction that led a coup on the SNCC leadership in 1966. Although not as prominent in the movement as Featherstone, Payne played a behind-the-scenes role as one of Brown’s most trusted lieutenants, one of his strong-arm goons.
Payne’s history paralleled Featherstone’s. He grew up the fourth of eight children in a lower-middle-class family and attended the University of Kentucky and Xavier University in Cincinnati. When he dropped out of Xavier in his junior year, he spent two years in the Navy before rejoining the SNCC as a field worker in the Deep South.
Friends described him as having “a general antipathy for whites.” At a recent Washington demonstration, Payne had interrupted the speakers and yelled, “Let’s go home and get our guns—enough of this talking!”
His militancy earned him the nickname Che, after the violent revolutionary Che Guevara, but not everybody saw him that way.
“He wasn’t any more militant than any of the rest of them,” his mother told a young Washington Post reporter named Carl Bernstein—still a few years before his Watergate reporting—when Payne was publicly identified as the second bomber. “Most young colored boys and girls are militant now. They’re just not swallowing what the old folks swallowed.”
A few days before the blast, Payne had arrived in Washington from Atlanta for H. Rap Brown’s trial. Friends told police he had arranged to meet with Featherstone and Brown in Bel Air that weekend.
Payne spent most of Monday, March 9, with Featherstone at the Drum and Spear Bookstore. Around two p.m., Featherstone borrowed a car from his neighbor, also a friend in the SNCC, but he didn’t tell her where he was going and she didn’t ask. A little after eight p.m., Featherstone closed the bookstore and left with Payne.
The last time anybody saw them alive was a few minutes later when Featherstone stopped briefly at his father’s townhouse on Tenth Street NW.
Four hours later, they both lay in pieces on the asphalt outside Bel Air.
We concluded, officially, that Ralph E. Featherstone and William H. Payne (aka C. B. Robinson) died when a bomb they were transporting detonated prematurely at 11:42 p.m., March 9, 1970, on Route 1 just south of Bel Air, Maryland. The cause of death in both cases was massive trauma from a dynamite explosion. The manner of death was an accident, not a homicide.
The discrepancy between the Navy’s dental records and the teeth in the corpse’s mouth was never resolved. We assumed that the military records had been mixed up, not uncommon in those days, but we never solved that mystery.
And the FBI’s bomb experts never pinpointed why the bomb went off. Did a nervous Payne accidentally set it off when a state trooper unexpectedly passed in the middle of the night? Had it been set to go off at the courthouse but never placed because of the police presence and never fully disarmed? Did a powerful electronic pulse from trooper Lastner’s police radio trigger the detonator? We still don’t know and never will.
A few days later, William H. Payne’s family took his ruined body home. He was buried in a little cemetery on the outskirts of Covington, Kentucky, where every Me
morial Day his grave is marked like every veteran’s, decorated with the flag of a country he wanted to overthrow.
* * *
But where was H. Rap Brown, the elusive firebrand who’d set this tragedy in motion and kept America on the brink of chaos for several days? Had he slipped out of their grasp again?
Almost two months later, on May 5, 1970, the FBI added Brown to its Ten Most Wanted list. Post-office posters warned that he was likely armed and dangerous. “Where’s Rap?” became a rallying cry among black radicals as cops everywhere in America looked for the incendiary rebel.
But Brown wasn’t in the United States. He’d secretly fled to Tanzania, where many SNCC expatriates had gone.
Eighteen months later, a New York City cop shot an African-American man on a rooftop after a robbery at a West Side bar. The wounded man identified himself as Roy Williams.
But Roy Williams’s fingerprints matched Hubert Gerold Brown, better known as H. Rap Brown. Charged with armed robbery and attempted murder of a policeman, Brown pleaded innocent. He was convicted after a ten-week trial and sent to New York’s Attica Prison, where he converted to Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.
Released in 1976 from Attica, Al-Amin moved to Atlanta, where he opened a small grocery store. SNCC had dissolved, and the old militants had died, moved on to new issues, or just given up. And H. Rap Brown, aka Al-Amin, claimed to be a changed man, too. He literally followed in his hero Malcolm X’s footsteps by making a pilgrimage to Mecca. He told a newspaper reporter that Allah doesn’t change societies until the individuals change themselves. He wrote about revolution through prayer and character, quite different from his warlike earlier book, Die, Nigger, Die!
Soon he cofounded a mosque in Atlanta’s West End, a mostly black enclave where he lived. Through programs of “spiritual regeneration,” he was credited with creating neighborhood patrols, starting youth programs, rescuing drug abusers, and all but cleansing the neighborhood of prostitution. He’d apparently evolved from a ferocious extremist to a merely passionate spiritual leader.
Morgue Page 11