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

by David Beasley

  Yet Harsh didn’t appear crazy to the Atlanta Constitution reporter who interviewed him in jail. “Harsh, tall, manly, well-built and pleasing of facial features, receives his visitors with a ‘glad to see you, sir,’” the reporter wrote. Harsh expressed deep regret for the killings. “Everything that I can undo I am trying to undo,” said Harsh. “I only wish I could undo the rest.”18

  Gallogly’s only statement to the reporter was that he would not interfere with the police investigation.

  Harsh’s trial began on January 15, 1929. Unlike in many capital cases in Georgia at the time, which were tried within two or three weeks of the defendant’s arrest, Harsh’s team had two months to prepare. The state sought death. Harsh was to be tried only on Smith’s murder. The prosecution held the Meeks case in reserve if needed.

  Harsh had confessed, so there was really no question of his guilt. Like Leopold and Loeb, he would present an insanity defense to avoid the electric chair. But a jury would decide Harsh’s fate. Leopold and Loeb had pleaded guilty to murder, which allowed a judge to decide whether they got life or death.

  Harsh’s lawyers put up psychiatric and other medical witnesses, complete with X-rays of Harsh’s entire body. The doctors concluded that “Harsh’s spine is curved, that his pituitary gland is small, that his heart is small, that his pelvic bones are unequal and that there are traces in various parts of his body of an infection of some kind,” the Atlanta Journal wrote. Yet no one could quite say how those conditions would cause a man to murder. Harsh had “irresistible impulses,” the experts said. He was a social recluse with “mind quirks.” And a neighbor from Milwaukee testified that as an infant, Harsh fell out of a baby carriage, tumbled down seven steps, and hit his head.

  Yet not one witness called him delusional. He had pledged a fraternity at Oglethorpe and frequently golfed at Atlanta country clubs. And a perfectly lucid essay he wrote at Oglethorpe about his first day on campus was introduced by the prosecution. A prior essay, on bathing in the Ganges River in India, was so well written that Professor James Rough thought Harsh had stolen it from a book. Rough did not know that Harsh had actually been to India on his round-the-world trip after his father’s death, and he asked Harsh to write another essay. This time, Harsh praised the students and staff at Oglethorpe for helping a young freshman on his first day. How could a deranged man write so clearly and eloquently? the prosecution asked. The defense did point out, however, that Harsh had misspelled “psychologist,” and that the composition “indicated an attitude of fear as a freshman.”

  Finally, the prosecution presented evidence that Harsh robbed not for the thrill of it, not as a psychological compulsion, but for money. He and Gallogly burned through their allowances so quickly that they were desperate for more money to buy liquor. There was, for example, an employee at an Atlanta barbecue stand who loaned Harsh $5. The collateral was a Swiss-jeweled watch engraved with the initials G.R.H. for George Rutherford Harsh.

  With the testimony concluded, John Boykin, the prosecutor, gave his closing arguments. He was no man of nuance. “He demanded that George’s head be shaved and enough electricity be sent surging through his body to send him to eternity.”19

  William Schley Howard, in Harsh’s defense, told the jury what most observers already knew about Harsh. You could see it in the courtroom. Harsh lacked any visible emotion about anything. “We went to that jail and talked with this boy,” Howard told the jurors. “We asked him why he did it and he said he didn’t know. He showed absolutely no emotional reactions and we came away convinced that the crime he committed was not that of a sane man.”

  Co-counsel Ben Conyers resorted to blaming bootleg liquor, based in part on one of the many bizarre medical claims from physician witnesses. “Doctors have told you that they found 58 percent of potash in the boy’s body,” Conyers told jurors. “Where did it come from? It came from the bootleg liquor that is being consumed in our community as in every other community in the land.”

  This Georgia jury didn’t believe it. It took only fifteen minutes to deliver a sentence: death.

  Harsh’s mother and sister cried, but Harsh reacted like Harsh always reacted. “There was not a tremor to indicate stress, nor the slightest twitching of the hands nor the heightening of color in his face,” the Journal reported.

  Harsh was to die “by electrocution in private, witnessed only by the executing officers, his relatives, counsel and such clergymen and friends as he may desire.” The date was set for March 15.

  Back in his jail cell, Harsh lay on his cot and calmly smoked.

  He would appeal, of course. And he had solid grounds, apparently.

  Judge E. D. Thomas, in his charge to the jury, said that Harsh had not asked for an acquittal and “the only question for you to determine is the measure of punishment that will be meted out.” In fact, Harsh’s attorneys pointed out in their appeal, he had pleaded not guilty. Despite the confession, the jury could have found Harsh not guilty based upon “mental irresponsibility.”20

  The Harsh conviction might well later be overturned on appeal, but for now, Boykin had secured a victory. But Boykin had trouble with Gallogly as that trial began on the frigid morning of January 29, 1929.

  Harsh had confessed, but Gallogly hadn’t. He was outside the drugstore when Smith was killed, he admitted. Yes, Smith was killed with his gun, the one he had in his car after the University of Georgia football game, the weapon he had owned since he was a cadet at Culver Military Academy. But prosecutors, Gallogly said, must understand this: Harsh was drunk that night, and he, Gallogly, tried desperately to keep him from robbing the drugstore. And he’d had no idea Harsh had taken his gun from his automobile.

  Harsh refused to testify. After all, what were they going to do to him if he didn’t? He was already on death row. So Gallogly’s version of the story wasn’t challenged.

  And unlike Harsh, a Yankee from Milwaukee, a carpetbagger even, Gallogly was a hometown boy. So it was easier to believe that the Yankee boy did the shooting, not Gallogly.

  If jurors did not already know who Gallogly’s family was, all they had to do was look in the courtroom. On the opening day of jury selection, there sat Hoke Smith.21

  Smith, who had sold the Journal to the Gray family, was U.S. secretary of the interior under President Grover Cleveland and was later governor of Georgia and a U.S. senator. Although a progressive, as governor he was the one who led the push for a state constitutional amendment that disenfranchised black voters, a trade-off for the support of former congressman Thomas E. Watson, a powerful racial demagogue. Blacks already were barred from voting in the Democratic primary, but the amendment made it much more difficult for them even to vote in the general elections, and black voter registration plummeted. “Negroes are better laborers and citizens when out of politics,” Smith said, explaining his support of the new restrictions.

  In an effort to get Smith, their man, their former owner, elected governor, the Atlanta Journal editors suddenly changed their minds about disenfranchisement for blacks. It wasn’t so bad after all, the Journal decided, throwing its support behind Smith, who won the 1906 election in a landslide.

  And here he was, Hoke Smith, this Georgia political legend, sitting next to Gallogly on the opening day of the trial. Smith “shook hands with Mrs. Worth Yankey and patted the defendant, Dick Gallogly, on the shoulder with his left hand,” the Journal reported. “With his hand still resting on the boy’s shoulder, he engaged Mrs. Yankey in conversation and later drew up a chair and took the seat between Gallogly and his mother.” The young man was as connected as you could be in the state of Georgia.

  Boykin had little testimony to contradict Gallogly’s assertion that he tried to talk Harsh out of the robbery. One of the prosecution witnesses was Tom Kirpatrick, a soda jerk at the drugstore who had been present during the robbery and who had identified Gallogly at the jail three weeks after the killing as the man who was standing at the door. On cross-examination, Kirpatrick admitted that he had
been hiding behind the soda fountain for much of the time that the bullets flew. He also confirmed that he originally told police that the gunman, who turned out to be Harsh, matched the description of Roy Dickerson, the notorious robber. So perhaps Kirpatrick was not a very reliable witness after all.

  Even James Stephens, the fourteen-year-old delivery boy, could not specifically identify Gallogly as the man in the doorway, testifying that he was running too fast to get a good look.

  Jack Mahoney, Harsh’s roommate, who was not charged in the case but had driven Gallogly’s car that night, testified for the state, but claimed that he didn’t see much. He dropped Harsh and Gallogly off at the corner of Boulevard and Jackson Street near the drugstore, believing that they were going to pick up dates for the night. Harsh and Gallogly told Mahoney that they were slipping the girls out of their homes and didn’t want them to know that there were three boys in the car, Mahoney testified. He circled the block a couple of times in Gallogly’s roadster and picked up Harsh and Gallogly a few minutes later at the corner of Jackson Street and Greenwood Avenue. “I asked where the girls were and Gallogly told me to drive away from there as soon as possible,” Mahoney said.

  Then Gallogly took the witness stand in the huge courtroom with its mahogany-colored wooden benches, high plastered ceilings, and marble-tiled floors, packed to the brim with lawyers and spectators.22

  Georgia law at the time allowed a defendant to make an unsworn statement to the jury with no cross-examination allowed. Gallogly started reading his statement to the jury but talked so fast and so low that Reuben Arnold suggested he stand directly in front of the jury box, which he did.

  Gallogly met Harsh the previous June and was enthralled, he told the jury. Harsh “told me much of his adventures in Milwaukee and they were very interesting.” Gallogly continued, “I am satisfied that drink caused George Harsh to commit this robbery.”

  In an account that differed substantially from Mahoney’s, Gallogly told the jury that on the night of October 16, he, Harsh, and Mahoney went for a ride in Gallogly’s car. “We were headed for no place in particular. We rode for a few hours and as we neared the Eighth Street pharmacy, George had me stop. George said, ‘I am going to rob that store. You and Jack wait here.’ I argued and pleaded with George not to do it.”

  As he stepped out of the car, Harsh reached into the side pocket of the roadster and removed Gallogly’s .45-caliber pistol, Gallogly said. Harsh’s own pistol had recently been taken away from him and hidden by his sister and brother-in-law, who were worried about the trouble the weapon might cause him, Gallogly explained.

  He followed Harsh to the drugstore and, at the doorway, pulled on his friend’s arm. “He jerked away from me and went on in anyway,” said Gallogly.

  While Harsh was inside the drugstore during the robbery, Gallogly stood outside. He quickly heard one shot from a small-caliber gun (Smith’s) and two shots from a large-caliber weapon (Gallogly’s own .45 held by Harsh), he told the jury. But Gallogly denied striking the delivery boy.

  Gallogly did cast aspersions on Mahoney, charging that Harsh’s roommate had been the getaway driver in several robberies with Harsh and had tried unsuccessfully to convince Harsh to rob a bank in Acworth, north of Atlanta.

  “I am not guilty of murder,” Gallogly insisted. “Willard Smith would be alive today if George Harsh had come back out of the drugstore when I took him by the arm and tried to stop him.”

  In closing arguments to a packed courtroom, Boykin, the district attorney, warned the jury that anything other than a death sentence would make Gallogly a free man very shortly. He would be in prison for only two or three years before “some soft-hearted governor turns him out on a pardon,” said Boykin.

  Arnold, the defense attorney, countered that the prosecutors were bloodthirsty “head hunters.” If the jury acquitted Gallogly, he could always be re-indicted as an accessory to the crime after the fact, which would carry a maximum of one to three years, Arnold argued. “Mercy is an attribute of God himself,” Arnold said.23

  The jurors, all white men, deadlocked, 6–6. Six wanted to acquit; six wanted life in prison. The judge declared a mistrial. Boykin tried Gallogly a second time. Once again, the jury deadlocked. The prosecutor was ready to go a third time, but on April 1, a deal was reached: Gallogly would plead guilty and get life in prison. In exchange for the plea, Harsh’s death sentence would be overturned, and he too would get life.

  Gallogly said he was pleading guilty “solely to save his friend, Harsh from the electric chair.” He was also tired of the trials, he said, and wanted to spare his family from having to go through another one.

  In a statement, Harsh thanked Gallogly. “Dick is not guilty of any murder,” Harsh said. “It is a great thing to have a friend who would do what he has done for me.”

  District Attorney Boykin said the most he could have hoped for by trying Gallogly a third time was life imprisonment. The prosecutor believed Harsh and Gallogly were equally guilty and should have the same punishment. He did not want to be accused of favoring Gallogly over Harsh with a lighter sentence.

  Harsh was from another state and had only two relatives, his sister and brother-in-law, in Atlanta, said Boykin. Gallogly was “a local boy who grew up here and is surrounded by relatives and friends of wealth and influence.” So Harsh would be allowed to live.

  Years later, Harsh would describe wealth as the real reason he and Gallogly escaped the gallows. “At the time of the two trials, my family could have easily raised a million dollars,” he wrote. Gallogly’s family “wholly owned the Atlanta Journal, the most powerful paper in the Southeast at the time, and millions were popcorn to them. Such money could keep criminal cases in court until the defendants died of old age.”24

  They had been saved from the electric chair, but they still faced the notorious Georgia chain gang. Unless their families’ money and influence could once again work miracles, Harsh and Gallogly faced this sentence: “to be confined at hard labor for a term not less than” their natural lives.25

  But neither Harsh nor Gallogly expected to end up on the chain gang that Robert Burns had endured and written about. They knew that their families’ money and influence would likely lead to shorter prison terms, and cushier time while they were in prison.

  Harsh and Gallogly did not know Ed Rivers at the time, but they would become all too familiar with him after he was elected governor in 1936. As governor, Rivers would come to control their fates.

  2

  The Great Titan

  In 1928, the same year George Harsh and Richard Gallogly were shooting up Atlanta, robbing and killing for the “thrill” of it, and Ed Rivers was making his first run for governor, there was a powerful, secret network across Georgia. It was the Ku Klux Klan, and it supported Ed Rivers.

  Rivers was a joiner of many groups and organizations, and he was the kind of man who always seemed not just to join groups but to lead them.

  Rivers first came to Georgia to attend Young Harris College. Rivers’s father wanted him to attend a school without sports so that he would focus on his studies, and Young Harris College in the north Georgia mountains fit his specification. Ever the leader, the doer, Ed promptly organized a college basketball team at Young Harris.1

  * * *

  After graduation, Ed and his new wife, Lucille, who was the daughter of one of Rivers’s science professors, landed teaching jobs in south Georgia. They had two children, a son and a daughter. Later, Ed studied law and, in the great burst of energy that was Ed Rivers, took over the town that would become Lakeland, pushing to change its former name, Milltown for the large lumber mill there, to something with more pizzazz. Rivers seemed to be everything; businessman, lawyer, politician, banker, president of a short-line railroad. He approached the Klan with the same zeal and quickly moved into a major leadership position, believing it could help him politically.

  In early 1927, the Klan’s imperial wizard, the national leader, was a dentist from Texas named Hiram
Wesley Evans who signed documents with the title “His Lordship.” He saw in Rivers great potential as a leader of the Klan. In February, Evans named Rivers a “great titan” of the Klan and put him in charge of nineteen counties in south Georgia. Rivers was the district supervisor, reporting to headquarters.2 It was likely a paid position, although the salary Rivers would have received is uncertain. As a great titan, Rivers would have his own Klan cabinet that included three advisers called great klaliffs, a secretary called a great kligrapp, a treasurer called a great klabee, a chaplain called a great kludd, and a Great Night Hawk. Together, they would be called the great titan and his seven furies. After retiring as a great titan, Rivers would have been called a great giant.3

  There was a time, just a few years earlier, when the Klan could get a man elected governor in Georgia and many other states. On September 23, 1924, Georgia governor Clifford Walker addressed the Klan’s national convention, where he was photographed with the imperial wizard, Hiram Evans. Georgia agriculture commissioner J. J. Brown admitted that he too attended the Kansas City “Klonvocation.”4

  In 1927, the Klan’s influence was waning both in Georgia and nationally but could still help a young politician in Georgia who had the blessings of the Klan as Rivers did.

  It is impossible to say exactly what the Klan was up to in those days in south Georgia during Rivers’s reign as great titan. There is no central repository for Klan records. Most were destroyed over the years, oftentimes amid criminal investigations. Surviving Klan records tend to turn up in scattered pieces in attics and barns. Only slowly over the years have researchers been able to piece together a glimpse of Klan membership rolls and other vital information about the secret organization during that time.

  Many of the details of the Klan’s night riding, the marauding, the floggings, the lynchings, are still a mystery, but the broad policy agenda of the Klan in the late 1920s is clear. It was a group that centered on maintaining the “purity” of the white race. It despised Catholics and promoted public education, including taxpayer-provided textbooks for schoolchildren.