Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South

by David Beasley

  And Rivers wanted even more than that. He wanted the Georgia Board of Education to “furnish every school pupil in Georgia a Bible.”30 Rivers, a Baptist, wanted the state to purchase eight hundred thousand Bibles, even though leading preachers opposed this, fearing government intrusion into religion.31 Rivers’s goal was to start classes to teach the many illiterate men and women of Georgia how to read so that they could understand the words in the Bible.32

  Ed Rivers was doing all these things, pushing new programs, spreading money all over the state, trying to buy hundreds of thousands of Bibles, when on December 9, 1938, he was faced with seven men about to die in the electric chair. They were about to die in a prison built by the New Deal.

  And this is the story of that day, of who died and who lived, of why one killer could escape the gallows while another would soon lie cold in his grave. It is the story of what government, a governor, did for the people and to the people. And it is the story of Ed Rivers.

  He was a complicated man who was not always what he seemed to be. It was said then, and is still said even now, that Ed Rivers would do “whatever he could get away with.”33 Some said Ed Rivers was the personification of both good and evil.

  1

  Thrill Killers

  You have to go back almost ten years before December 9, 1938, to get to the beginning of this story. Ed Rivers was an up-and-coming politician then, serving as a state senator from Lakeland.

  It would be another eight years before Rivers would be elected governor, but he was trying to make a name for himself statewide, trying to lay a foundation. He was only thirty-three years old in 1928 and unknown to most Georgians. Rivers decided the best way to remedy that would be to run for governor, challenging the incumbent, L. G. Hardman, a wealthy physician, for the Democratic Party nomination. The energetic Rivers traveled up and down the red clay roads of Georgia, making speeches, introducing himself to the voters, apologizing for his young age with the joke “I am getting old as fast as I can,” and realizing he would probably not win.1 But it would be a start.

  On election night in September 1928, the people of Lakeland crowded into the courtroom on Main Street, wishing for a Rivers victory. The town’s telephone switchboard operator, a woman with a pleasant voice named Vera Wooten, lived and worked across the hall from the courtroom. She heard a roar of laughter. A cat had walked through the courtroom with a sign reading “Vote for Ed Rivers” around its neck.2 But this was not the year for Rivers. He lost badly to Hardman in the Democratic primary, as most had expected, despite spending $10,000 of his own money, an amount that signaled Rivers was already an affluent young man indeed. He would grow wealthier over the years.

  Back then, winning the Democratic primary in Georgia was the same as winning the election. Even though a third of Georgia’s citizens were black, they were barred by state law from voting in the all-important and all-white Democratic primary.

  During the same time in 1928 that the ambitious Ed Rivers was on his quixotic quest to become governor, two college boys in Atlanta, George Harsh Jr. and Richard Gray Gallogly, were spending their time in a fog of bootleg liquor, cigarette smoke, and guns.3

  They were both sons of wealthy and powerful white families and were classmates at Oglethorpe University, a private Presbyterian college near Atlanta that everybody knew because of its Gothic architecture.

  Harsh and Gallogly were tall, handsome, and well dressed. Harsh, the nineteen-year-old son of a Milwaukee shoe manufacturer, was well traveled, having taken a trip around the world as a teenager. Gallogly, twenty years old, was the grandson of the owners of the Atlanta Journal newspaper and WSB radio station. His family owned a big share of the media in the state’s capital and largest city.

  During the summer of 1928, Harsh and Gallogly drove fast cars. They carried pistols. Once when they were drunk on moonshine, they shot out streetlights on the Oglethorpe campus. Gallogly loved the thrill of flying airplanes. He was also suspected of calling in false fire alarms late at night just “to see the engines run.”4

  Both Harsh and Gallogly had lost their fathers, Harsh to death, Gallogly to divorce. Harsh was only twelve when his father died, leaving him a $500,000 trust fund. Gallogly’s father, James A. Gallogly, a West Point graduate and decorated World War I veteran, was an attorney and a stockbroker. The family tried to encourage Richard Gallogly to follow his father in the military tradition, sending him to Culver Military Academy in Indiana, but it did not stick. He returned to Atlanta to attend Oglethorpe, where he took to drinking and carousing. And that did stick.

  In February 1928, Gallogly’s mother, Frances Gray Gallogly, remarried. Her new husband was a prominent physician, Dr. Worth E. Yankey.

  They all lived with Frances’s mother, Mary Inman Gray, widow of Atlanta Journal editor and owner James R. Gray, in a stone mansion on the 2800 block of Peachtree Road. The house was called “Graystone.” Richard commuted to Oglethorpe, which was about five miles north on Peachtree.

  Graystone was the kind of home that had a name and was known by that name, where weddings and funerals were held, along with piano recitals and teas. It was there that the granddaughters were “presented to society.” At Graystone on September 18, 1928, Richard Gallogly’s cousin, Mary Louise Brumby, married Charles Christopher McGehee.5 Mary Louise was the daughter of Thomas Brumby, president of the Brumby Chair Company, maker of the famous rocking chair. The Brumbys, like the Grays, were newspaper publishers, owners of the Marietta Daily Journal north of Atlanta.

  At the wedding of Mary Louis and Charles, they had an orchestra, accompanied by a lady playing a harp. The bridal party descended the staircase, which was decorated with ferns and baskets filled with Easter lilies. The bride and groom then entered the drawing room, where there were more baskets holding Easter lilies. There were also roses and a flower from Australia called swainsona.6

  The betrothed said their vows underneath a canopy of white satin. In the dining room was a heart-shaped bride’s table that had been used in the weddings of the bride’s mother and aunts, including Richard Gallogly’s mother. More flowers: dahlias, lilies, swainsona, white roses.

  Only a few days after the flowers had wilted and the music of the harpist had faded, Richard Gallogly and George Harsh launched a killing spree.

  This was the Roaring Twenties. Prohibition was in full force, so Harsh and Gallogly went to an illegal roadhouse south of Atlanta with three other college buddies, where they drank bootleg corn liquor out of a gallon jar. Gallogly excused himself, went to his car, and returned with a Colt .45 pistol, which he placed on the table. The .45 was a big, powerful weapon, for years standard issue in the U.S. Army. But it was not just a pistol, Gallogly said. It was a tool to control other men, to be “the absolute master of any situation.”7

  Harsh and Gallogly began robbing stores that very night, and they kept on robbing.

  On Saturday night, October 6, at about ten o’clock, they robbed an A&P grocery store on Hemphill Avenue. With at least ten customers still in the store, Harsh—well dressed in a blue coat and a felt hat, wearing a collar and a tie—entered with his pistol blazing. His bullets struck a clerk, S. H. Meeks, and I. V. Ellis, the store manager, who was counting the night’s cash receipts. Bullets struck the wooden grocery store counter and drilled a hole in a large coffee container.

  Ellis, wounded in the left arm and right leg, managed to reach under the counter, pull out a pistol, and return fire. Harsh fled, without having taken any loot, to the getaway car driven by Gallogly. Harsh had minor gunshot wounds. Ellis survived but Meeks died twenty-four hours later.

  “The .45 had now drawn its first blood and a man had been killed,” Harsh would later recall, “but we kept on.”8

  Just ten days after the Meeks murder, Harsh and Gallogly struck again, this time at a pharmacy on the corner of Eighth Street and Boulevard (now called Monroe Drive). Harsh entered the store at about 11:15 p.m. and pulled the .45. Gallogly stood guard at the door, and Jack Mahoney, Harsh’s roommate at
Oglethorpe and a fellow pledge of Kappa Alpha fraternity, was in the getaway car.

  By this time, Atlanta merchants were on their guard, having read newspaper accounts of a rash of armed robberies, including the deadly A&P shoot-out. The press speculated that one of the robbers was an infamous criminal and jailbreak artist, Roy Dickerson.

  When Harsh drew his weapon and in an “extremely nonchalant” tone announced that it was a stickup, the twenty-four-year-old clerk, Willard Smith, immediately pulled a pistol, and there was a gunfight. Harsh hit Smith with a bullet in the lung; Smith managed to get Harsh with a bullet to the hip. As the bullets flew, smashing bottles of ginger ale on the store shelves, James Stephens, a black fourteen-year-old delivery boy who had been asleep in a window seat, ran out the door. Gallogly, posted in the doorway, tried to stop him, punching him in the face.9

  Once again, Harsh left the robbery without any money. And this time, his wound was serious.

  “As I limped out to the waiting car, I could feel the warm blood running down my leg and squishing in my shoe,” he would recall. “If I didn’t die from that wound, I knew a hangman’s noose was waiting for me, or worse, a prison cell for the rest of my life.”10

  He was “angry at a stupid clerk who thought he could shoot it out with a scared, trigger-nervous bandit who had the drop on him. If his employers had not drilled into him how to act during a holdup, the insurance companies should have.”11

  Smith, the man Harsh viewed as a stupid clerk, died of his wounds October 21, leaving behind a widow, Mary Belle Smith.

  Gallogly and Mahoney had to get Harsh to a doctor quickly, but obviously, they couldn’t take him to a hospital. They tried to get an Emory University medical student to give Harsh a look, but the student refused, worried about what his classmates might think, and the questions they might ask about how Harsh had been wounded. They drove Harsh instead to the Sixteenth Street apartment of Jack Wright, a stockbroker and a friend of Harsh’s from Milwaukee, and then called Harsh’s personal physician, Dr. Julian Riley, who arrived at 3 a.m. and was told his patient was injured “scuffling for a gun in a drugstore.” Riley took Harsh to St. Joseph’s Hospital.12

  As Gallogly and Mahoney drove home that morning to Graystone, Mahoney tossed Harsh’s shirt and bloody underwear into Peachtree Creek, first cutting out the name tags that identified the clothes as belonging to Harsh.13

  They weren’t so careful with Harsh’s bloody trousers, leaving them behind at Wright’s apartment on the floor of a closet.

  The Atlanta Journal the next day called the robbers “thugs,” having no way of knowing that one of them was the grandson of the newspaper’s owner.14

  Harsh left the hospital the next day and returned to his dormitory room at Oglethorpe, telling other students he had slipped and fallen on a bottle. They jokingly called him “glass hip Harsh.”

  It was only a matter of time, however, before gossip about Harsh’s injury reached the Atlanta Police Department. Wright, the stockbroker from Milwaukee, mentioned the incident to his secretary, who repeated it at a dinner party. Detective John W. Lowe was soon knocking on the door of Wright’s apartment. Wright was out of town, but a maid let Lowe in. There he found a pair of bloodstained pants with a bullet hole in the hip. A tag inside the pants led detectives to a dry cleaner, who identified Harsh as the customer.

  Saturday, October 27, was a crisp fall day, partly cloudy, with a low in the forties and a high in the sixties, great football weather. Lowe and a motorcycle policeman stopped Harsh at the corner of North Avenue and Peachtree Street as he was heading to a football game between Georgia Tech and North Carolina, which Tech would win 20–7. Lowe confronted Harsh with the bloody trousers. And then it was all over. Harsh quickly confessed to the two killings and five other robberies and named Gallogly as his accomplice. Harsh blamed it all on liquor, but he could not have been too drunk during the crime spree, because he gave police very detailed information about the seven robberies and two killings the students had committed.

  “Harsh remembers even the slightest details of each one of his performances,” said Lamar Poole, chief of the detective bureau. “I don’t think it would be possible for him to retain those details if his mind had been blotted by drink.”

  Poole defended Dr. Riley, the physician who treated Harsh for his gunshot wound and took him to the hospital. “Personally, I think it would have been hard to convince anyone that night, even myself, that Harsh was the man shot by Smith,” Poole said.15 The polite young Harsh just didn’t look like a killer.

  Gallogly was arrested that same day after leaving another college football game, the homecoming game at the University of Georgia in nearby Athens. In the side pocket of Gallogly’s cream-colored roadster convertible, police found the .45-caliber pistol. But unlike Harsh, Gallogly wasn’t confessing to anything.

  The Atlanta Journal published Gallogy’s full name and Peachtree Road address, including his middle name, Gray, and the name of his mother, but little else about his background. They didn’t mention that his grandmother owned the newspaper and WSB radio station or even that he was from a prominent Atlanta family.

  The Atlanta Constitution, the Journal’s morning rival, wrote that Gallogly was the grandson of James R. Gray, “who was one of Atlanta’s best-known citizens.” And that was an understatement. As a young lawyer, Gray had married into the wealthy Inman family, and he’d purchased controlling interest of the Journal in 1900. It was one of the most respected newspapers in the South, counting among its alumni Margaret Mitchell, author of one of the best-selling novels of all time, Gone with the Wind, and Erskine Caldwell, who wrote two best-sellers of his own. The Journal’s motto was “Covers Dixie Like the Dew.”

  Gray’s was a powerful voice of moderation when Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager, was convicted in 1913 of the murder of a twelve-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, and sentenced to death by hanging. It was a huge case, attracting national attention, and Gray wrote an editorial in the New York Times calling on Georgia governor John Slaton to commute Frank’s death sentence to life: “For whatever extremes of passion the popular mind may be swept,” Gray wrote, “reason eventually regains its sway. After the wind and the earthquake and the fire, there always speaks ‘a still small voice.’”16

  Slaton did commute the death sentence, but a mob seized Frank from the state prison in Milledgeville, drove him back to Marietta, the town where Phagan had lived, and hanged him from the limb of an oak tree.

  It was only a year later that Gray was among thousands of people who gathered to celebrate the rebirth of Oglethorpe University. Originally located in Milledgeville, the college had closed during the Civil War. It had now been rebuilt on a new campus on Peachtree Road. As editor of the Journal and a staunch Presbyterian, Gray had been the leader in the resurrection of Oglethorpe. Gray died on June 25, 1917. His funeral was held at Graystone, and President Woodrow Wilson was among those who sent his condolences.

  This family was a bastion of respectability—and then came Gallogly’s scandalous arrest for two murders. It was embarrassing to the Atlanta Journal and the Gray and Inman families. It was embarrassing to Oglethorpe University. Gallogly hadn’t pulled the trigger in either case, but under Georgia law he could be found guilty of murder as an accomplice. Both he and Harsh could die in the electric chair. As a matter of fact, they could be dead before Christmas.

  The newspapers called Gallogly and Harsh “thrill killers.” They killed only out of boredom, for the thrill of it and not for money, the press said.

  Next came comparisons to the Leopold and Loeb case.

  Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were two wealthy Chicago college students who had plotted “the perfect crime.” In the summer of 1924, they lured a fourteen-year-old boy into a rented car and stabbed him to death with a chisel. They drove to a remote location, doused the body with hydrochloric acid, and dumped it in a culvert.

  They might never have been caught but for the fact that Leopold dropped his eyegla
sses near the body. Police tracked the hinges on the glasses to an optometrist in Chicago who had sold only three pairs of that kind. If it hadn’t been for the brilliance of their attorney, Clarence Darrow, Leopold and Loeb would have been executed. Darrow managed to get them life in prison.

  Reporters called Darrow about Harsh and Gallogly. An Associated Press story from New York reported that in Darrow’s opinion, the case “presented some of the same psychological, sociological problems that marked the case of Leopold and Loeb. Harsh and Gallogly were like Leopold and Loeb, from wealthy families, with plenty of money for their own devices.” Although Darrow, then sixty-seven years old, had not been asked to defend Harsh and Gallogly, he was willing. “I never could stand it to sit by and see such a court battle as this will doubtless be and not get into it if I were asked.”17

  Harsh and Gallogly ended up not hiring Darrow, but they did get two of the best lawyers in town: Harsh retained William Schley Howard, a former congressman, and Gallogly chose Reuben Arnold. Both lawyers had been members of Leo Frank’s defense team.

  At the Fulton County Jail, the authorities treated Harsh and Gallogly like celebrities, taking them out to a barbershop for haircuts before the press photographs on Monday. Harsh and Gallogly both wore suits for their pictures. Harsh sported a bow tie. They posed separately for their pictures, and reporters were sensing correctly that they would go their separate ways at trial as well.

  Someone sent a giant fruit basket to Harsh at the jail. He shared with other inmates, including Gallogly. Then on Thursday afternoon, it was off to the psychiatrist’s office downtown. Escorted by sheriff’s deputies, the shackled Harsh smoked cigarettes as he entered the downtown office of Dr. Frank Eskridge.

  “X-ray photographs were made of Harsh’s head and other parts of his body,” the Atlanta Journal wrote. “Exact measurements were taken of his muscles, his nervous reactions were carefully recorded and he was questioned closely as to events in his past that might throw light on his mental condition.”