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

by David Beasley

  Williams told police he dropped Grady off at the bus station in Atlanta at 11 a.m. on August 4. But there was other evidence that refuted this. At the exact same time, 11 a.m., Williams had used his Gulf credit card at a station south of Atlanta. The station owner remembered both Williams and his son in the car and that Williams asked for directions to Augusta.

  And there was the gun he borrowed from the parishioner, W. T. Standard. Two shots had recently been fired from it. Williams claimed Grady had fired it in the pasture during his visit home, but ballistics tests indicated that the bullets found in Grady’s body were fired from that same pistol.

  Even the envelope, addressed “Rev. J. M. Williams, Rochelle, Ga.” was damning to the preacher, police believed. Williams placed the letter there to make sure authorities immediately contacted him in Rochelle, not the Navy, not Grady’s widow in Maine.

  Time was of the essence after Grady’s death. The car notes were due in just a few short weeks. Any delay, through the Navy bureaucracy or from a widow’s questioning of the life insurance policies, could backfire for Williams. He had to have total control.

  The evidence was piling up rapidly.

  Williams claimed to have been back at home in Rochelle slightly after midnight on August 5, having arrived around midnight. He was, therefore, asleep in his own bed when Grady was shot. Conveniently, he rolled into the sleepy town after everyone—even Mrs. Hawkes and her husband, who were keeping Williams’s daughters, since the minister’s wife was out of town—had turned out their lights and gone to bed.

  The Hawkes family had been expecting Williams to arrive home the afternoon of August 4, and indeed, he should have arrived by then had he driven straight home from Atlanta after dropping Grady off at the bus station at 11 a.m. as he claimed.11

  Williams told police he took a slow, rambling trip home, stopping at the Capitol Theater in Macon to watch a movie, simply because he was tired. But he could not recall the title of the film or even the characters in it.12

  In establishing an alibi, Williams benefited immensely from the fact that his wife was out of town attending a relative’s funeral and his three daughters were at the Hawkes house. And the Hawkes family did the minister a big favor when they turned in for the night at fifteen minutes before midnight. There was no one to rebut Williams’s statement that he had arrived back in Rochelle around midnight, which would have placed him in Rochelle, not in Augusta, when his son was killed.

  According to the coroner’s physician, Grady had been dead four to eight hours when the body was examined at 9:30 a.m. on August 5. The earliest he could have been killed was around 1:30 a.m., the latest 5:30 a.m. It was a three-to four-hour drive from Augusta to Rochelle given that Williams’s new Dodge could reach speeds of nearly 80 miles per hour.

  During a seven-hour window, starting just before midnight when Mr. and Mrs. Hawkes went to sleep, no one saw the preacher face-to-face.

  Mr. Hawkes said he did not see Williams until 7 a.m. on August 5, when the minister walked over to retrieve his daughters. Another witness later said he heard a car pull into Williams’s driveway at around 3:40 a.m.; yet another said at 5 a.m. It was entirely possible that Williams had arrived back in Rochelle not around midnight but hours later, having killed Grady and laid his body to rest in the field. But the testimony on this was sketchy and conflicting.

  Williams said that after arriving in Rochelle after midnight, he woke up at the crack of dawn on August 5 and was in for a busy morning with his wife out of town and many chores to be done around the house. First, he planned to drive six miles out into the country to buy fruits and vegetables. But a half mile or so out, Williams passed the home of his laundress and remembered that he needed to send her a batch of clothes, so he returned home.13

  He gathered clothes for a while, then walked over to the Hawkes home to retrieve his daughters. It was now 7 a.m. Mr. Hawkes invited him to stay for breakfast but he declined, saying the family had too much work to do. Williams then milked the family cow. His daughters had placed their laundry on a sheet spread on the floor, so he tied it up and headed off to the home of the laundress. When he returned, breakfast was ready. It was then off to the post office to retrieve his mail and to send the telegram to Grady’s commanding officer about his pending arrival the next day in New York, the telegram the officer testified was totally unnecessary and baffling.

  Later in the morning, Williams was sitting on his porch reading his newspaper when a neighbor told him that Grady’s body had been discovered near Augusta.

  Despite his alibi, police could not ignore the overwhelming amount of circumstantial evidence against Williams that pointed to him as the killer of his son.

  A month and one day after the killing, Williams was arrested at his home in Rochelle on a Sunday morning shortly before church services were to begin. Parishioners were gathered in the church, waiting for services to begin. Looking out the windows, they could see police taking their pastor away.14 As Richmond County sheriff M. Gary Whittle arrested him, Williams turned to his wife and told her he had no money and that the neighbors would have to look out for her. However, Williams had received the life insurance check for $2,517.64 just two days earlier, had deposited it in an Albany bank on September 5, and had written checks totaling $1,600 to pay off the conflicting liens against the car. He took $200 in cash, leaving him with at least $700 in the bank.

  Williams might have been prepared to leave his wife and children to the mercies of the people of Rochelle, but one of his daughters thought better.

  As the sheriff led him away, one of the preacher’s daughters whispered something into his ear and Williams then handed his wife his wallet. It seems the minister had been planning on taking whatever cash he had with him to jail.

  On Monday morning, the day after his arrest, Williams was questioned by Sheriff Whittle at the Richmond County Jail. He denied the killing, of course, recounting how he had last seen his son in Atlanta after dropping him off at the bus station. He speculated that Grady had met someone at the station who had offered him a ride back to New York but then robbed him and killed him instead.

  Williams denied having the borrowed pistol with him on the trip to Berry College in Rome and Atlanta, saying he had already returned it by then to his neighbor, W. T. Standard in Rochelle, contradicting Standard’s statement that Williams returned it only after Grady was dead.

  The sheriff pounded on an image: Grady lying dead in the field, gently placed there, his coat neatly folded across his body. The killer had made certain Grady was dead—shooting him in the heart. Why would a stranger take the time and effort to arrange Grady’s body so carefully?

  “Wouldn’t a father have done that to show some affection even after he done that horrible thing?” the sheriff asked. “There couldn’t be any other reason that would come in the human mind except that the body had been brutally treated and then all of a sudden came that affectionate thought and the coat was neatly folded and placed upon the pitiful body that would need it no more.”15

  The sheriff pressed the point: Why did the killer not just throw the coat down violently with the body instead of folding it so carefully?

  The preacher shook his head. “I just don’t know,” Williams replied. “I know this. I didn’t do it and I couldn’t do it.”

  “Why?” asked the sheriff.

  “Because I am not that kind of a father. I am a man of tender heart and love and affection for my family and friends.”

  Williams revealed to the sheriff the life insurance he collected after Grady’s death and said that he used part of the money to pay debts. The rest was in a bank, but Williams refused to disclose which bank. He also volunteered that he had previously purchased fire insurance on his cars, and that he had collected a $400 claim on the old Ford that he used as a trade-in on the new Dodge. Williams clammed up on that topic as the sheriff probed about the burned-out car, which was apparently another auto-related revenue stream the minister had developed: burning cars for the i
nsurance money.

  Then there was the matter of Grady’s funeral bill. The Navy paid $200 of the costs, but that did not cover everything, and the funeral home sent Williams a bill for the remainder, about $100. The preacher, however, did not pay the $100 but forwarded the bill instead to Grady’s widow who lived in Maine with her young child.

  “Did you expect her to pay it?” the sheriff asked.

  “That was entirely up to her,” Williams replied.

  In late September, a naval board ruled that robbery was the motive in Grady’s killing and that the young sailor had been knocked unconscious by a sandbag or “other similar instrument” before he was shot with a .38-caliber pistol. Grady’s right arm was bruised “as if the victim had tried to ward off the blow.”16

  Williams’s trial began on Monday, October 19, only about six weeks after his arrest. Spectators by the hundreds turned out for the trial, pushing their way into the courthouse.17 When Judge A. L. Franklin announced that there would be no undue crowding of the courtroom, several men rigged a frame made of iron piping and climbed into a window. Bailiffs expelled them.

  District Attorney George Hains sought the death penalty. He presented a simple synopsis of the case. Williams lured his son to Georgia and killed him for the insurance money so that the preacher would not be “exposed as a fraud and a cheat.” When Williams and Grady were seen together the day before the murder, Grady was “in some of a daze or stupor, apparently doped,” the prosecutor said. Robbery could not have been the motive for the killing because, quite simply, Grady had little money with him on his trip to Georgia.

  F. Frederick Kennedy, Williams’s lead attorney, pointed out that the evidence against his client was all circumstantial.

  The first witness was a black woman, the laundress from Rochelle, who said Williams brought her a bloody shirt to clean two days after Grady died. There were witnesses who said the bullets that killed Grady were fired from the .38-caliber pistol borrowed by Williams from a neighbor, that the tire tracks near Grady’s body matched the tires from Williams’s new car, and that the footprints matched Williams’s shoe size.

  Again and again, the odd placement of Grady’s body and its pristine condition surfaced in testimony. A deputy testified that he ran a toothpick on the soles of Grady’s shoes and picked up no sand, that was how gently he was laid to rest in the field.

  A manager at the tourist camp south of Atlanta where Williams and Grady spent the night testified that Grady appeared intoxicated. Yet Williams told investigators early on that Grady never drank, and no liquor was discovered in his stomach during the autopsy.

  In an hour-long unsworn statement, which under Georgia law was not subject to cross-examination, Williams told his life story, starting with the demanding upbringing on the farm and his path to the pulpit. He told of leaving Grady at the bus station and his son’s promise to return in November, repeating the contention that Grady was flush with cash and that he even offered some money to his father as they said their good-byes.

  He explained why the manager at the tourist camp would perceive Grady as intoxicated: “My son did not talk very loud and developed that Northern brogue that so many Southerners do develop after being in the Navy,” Williams said.

  As he had in his earlier statement to police, Williams denied the killing.18

  The defense also called witnesses who said they saw a man matching Grady’s description in and around Augusta, in a café, on a bus, on the day of the murder, which would have backed up Williams’s contention that Grady somehow made it to Augusta on his own and was then killed.

  In closing arguments at the end of the three-day trial, the district attorney, Hains, told the jury that Williams was a cheater, a swindler, and a killer. “Money is his very God,” said the prosecutor.19

  Defense attorney M. C. Barwick countered that not a single witness saw Williams within 175 miles of Augusta and that the ballistics and tire-track matches were questionable.

  “How could a man who preaches in the pulpit, who reads the Bible in daily contemplation, and converted hundreds of people during the time he has been a pastor do such a terrible thing as kill his own son for money?” the attorney asked.

  The twelve jurors, all white males, wrestled with those same questions. Williams, waiting for the verdict in his Richmond County Jail cell, vowed to keep on preaching, preferably under tents, in revival settings. He had resigned from the Methodist church, both as a pastor and a member, but told church officials he could not surrender his credentials because they had been destroyed in a parsonage fire.20 If acquitted, Williams told a reporter, he would ask the church to restore him as a pastor, but even if denied, he would continue as a minister. “That is my calling,” said Williams.21

  After deliberating forty-four hours, the jury deadlocked, with nine members voting guilty and recommending life, not death in the electric chair, and three, including the jury foreman, believing the minister was innocent. Williams, sitting with his wife and oldest son, Clarence, showed no emotion when the deadlock was announced.

  Prosecutors tried Williams again, beginning on December 7. He had lawyers but little else, no money to pay for expert witnesses to counter the state’s case. Richmond County had to pay the travel expenses of defense witnesses because Williams was out of money.

  A cross-examination of Maurice O’Neill, a ballistics expert from New Orleans, proved ridiculous. Defense attorney M. C. Barwick handed O’Neill two bullets and asked him to place them in the ballistics testing machine he had brought with him to the courtroom to determine whether they had been fired from the same weapon. O’Neill said he would perform the test only if he was paid to do so.

  “I have no money to pay anybody,” said Barwick.

  The next day, Judge A. L. Franklin told the lawyers the court would pay for the tests, but another defense attorney, L. T. Mahoney, confessed that he had taken the bullets home with him the night before and they were “all mixed up” with other bullets.

  “I am afraid I have lost track of what bullets came from what guns,” Mahoney said. The ballistics test was called off.

  As the testimony concluded, defense attorneys asked Judge Franklin to instruct the jury to disregard Williams’s desperate financial condition. They should not assume that “a poor man on account of his poverty or embarrassment about money matters would be the more ready for that reason to take the life of another.” But the judge refused to include that statement in his charge to the jury, believing that the preacher’s dire finances may indeed have been the motive for Grady’s murder.

  On Saturday, December 12, the jurors convicted Williams, although the day before they had deliberated for five hours, and it had appeared that another mistrial might be in the offing.

  “I did not kill my son,” said Williams when the verdict was read.22

  The jurors, again all white men, had decided differently. They believed that Williams shot his son in the heart and, as the sheriff had said, gently placed Grady’s coat on “the pitiful body that would need it no more.”

  Yet they gave Williams life on the Georgia chain gang, not the electric chair.

  They gave him mercy.

  Just as Ed Rivers, the Klan’s great titan, would come to decide the fate of George Harsh and Richard Gallogly, the “thrill killers” from Atlanta, he would eventually control the destiny of this preacher, now a convicted killer.

  4

  A Baby with No Name

  Georgia in the late 1930s was still plagued by many human maladies, most of them the direct result of poverty. There were “problems during birth, malnutrition before birth.”

  One ugly statistical snapshot of an eighth-month period in Georgia showed that out of 39,495 births, 1,984 were stillbirths, nearly 5 percent. Another 2,518 babies died in infancy, and 231 mothers died in childbirth. Out of 20,022 deaths in Georgia during that eight-month period, nearly 5,000—one in four of the dead—were babies, infants, or mothers.1

  There were during this same time period
187 deaths from pellagra, a form of malnutrition caused by eating only corn, 85 deaths from dysentery, 312 from diarrhea, 55 from typhoid, 42 from malaria, 38 from diphtheria.

  There was a public heath nurse who reported a real-life family that might have appeared in the pages of an Erskine Caldwell novel. The husband and the wife lived with four small children near Athens in a house the nurse said was in tumbledown condition. The mother was about to deliver another child. The only person in the family with any education was the father, who had reached the fifth grade. The father was confident he could get a job chopping cotton at 75 cents a day “as the weather permitted.” The family drank water from a well that looked polluted, and the nurse urged the father to boil their water, since “he had dysentery last summer and at this time his oldest boy is sick with headache.”2

  When Ed Rivers was inaugurated as governor in January 1937, he endorsed Roosevelt’s New Deal completely, the New Deal that was struggling to fight this poverty. Few if any of the benefits of the massive government programs had yet reached the beleaguered south Georgia household of Tom Dickerson, a fifty-five-year-old white tenant farmer.

  Dickerson was living in a two-room farmhouse, struggling to support eight children. His wife had died on November 27, 1935, leaving him with all those children, one a baby only eighteen days old.3

  Dickerson was a tall man often described as “grizzled.” It was an accurate adjective and not just for his graying hair, but for the hardship of his life overall: the sweat from the broiling Georgia sun, the mosquitoes, the gnats, the struggle to raise eight children without a mother, one of many similar hard-luck stories in Georgia at the time.

  This was the Great Depression, and the Dickersons were poor. There were so many people—nine, of all ages. And the house they lived in was so small—only two rooms. “We use one of the rooms for cooking and the other for sleeping,” said Tina Mae Dickerson, twenty-two, the oldest child. “All sleep and dress and undress in the same room.”