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

by David Beasley

  When Tina Mae’s mother died, Tom Dickerson no longer had a wife. He knew it was wrong to think of Tina Mae as his wife. It was wrong for him to place his rough hands on her—hands of coarse, callused leather after a lifetime of toiling on that farm. It was wrong and he was ashamed of what he had done. Dickerson believed in God but he also believed there was a Devil and a constant competition between the angels for a man’s heart and soul. He respected and feared the Devil’s power and therefore spelled the word with a capital D. Even when using a pronoun for the Devil, Dickerson capitalized He, so powerful and destructive did Tom feel the Devil could be.

  The Devil’s work was done now, and there was nothing Tom could do about it except to keep on working to feed those children. But then one day he discovered that Tina Mae was with child. His child. Tom could not think about that, could not even breathe those words. She was with child and that was bad enough. That was shame. That was disgrace. That was His work, the Devil’s work.

  He tried not to think about it as he paced the floor at night, but the months passed, and one day Tina Mae was having labor pains. Tom sent one of his sons to fetch the doctor. The baby was born on July 31, 1937, a healthy boy.

  Tom paced more and more. He could not stand to look at that baby boy or to hear him cry. The baby was a constant reminder of the shame of what he had done, the shame of what He had made him do.

  The boy was three days old. He still had no name. Tina Mae was in a fog, exhausted from the delivery. She slept most of the time. Tom waited until sundown. Tina Mae was asleep. The other children were outside, washing up for the night at the well.

  Tom had already built a crude box. It was ready to go. Then he got the rope, a small piece of rope, and put it in his pocket. And he quietly reached into the bed and lifted the baby boy. Tina Mae did not wake up. He walked out of the house with the baby and into the woods. He put the rope around the boy’s neck and he pulled it tight. The baby died quickly. He wrapped the body in old sheets and placed the baby in the box. He dropped the piece of rope in the box and buried it in the woods.

  Tina Mae woke up at 9 a.m. on August 4 and there was no baby. Where was her baby? she wondered. What had happened to the baby?4

  “I was still confined to my bed at the time from the effects of having the child,” said Tina Mae. “At the time I missed the child I didn’t inquire as to its whereabouts at the present, wasn’t anyone in the room. The first person who came in the room after I missed the child was Daddy, Tom Dickerson. I asked him where the child was. He said he killed it. I asked him why did he do it. He said to keep down any further disgrace and scandal on the other girls.

  “I had never named the child. Tom Dickerson was the father of that child. I did not consent to Tom Dickerson having intercourse with me. It was against my will and without my consent. He forced me to.

  “I asked my father how he killed the child. He said he put a piece of rope around its neck and choked it to death. He didn’t tell me where he buried it.”5

  Later that day, Dickerson gathered the children and told them that if they were called as witnesses they should say “that it just died during the night and that not thinking about a burial certificate, he just took it out and buried it to keep from any disgrace on the girls,” said Tina Mae. “My father told me to make that statement.”6

  The healthy baby boy, never named, had been Tom Dickerson’s son and his grandson. But Tom could now manage to refer to the child only as “it.”

  The family kept the horrible secret. Still, word found a way to spread through rural Ben Hill County. A baby had died. Tom Dickerson had killed that baby.

  By October, Tom got word that the sheriff was after him. Ben Hill County sheriff J. V. Griner said, “We had heard rumors of what was going on, what was happening up there.”

  Dickerson ran into the woods.

  He hid there for a day and a night until he finally got tired and decided to surrender. He told a neighbor, Homer Coplin, to notify the sheriff.

  “I ask him, I said to him, I said, ‘Tom, none of the other children didn’t have nothing to do with the baby business, did they?’” Coplin recalled. “He said, ‘No,’ said ‘they was all at the well washing.’ I ask him then, I said, ‘Well, how did you kill the baby, did you knock it in the head with a stick or shoot it?’ He said ‘I tied a piece of rope around its neck just about that long … and choked it to death.’”

  When the sheriff arrived at Dickerson’s house, he cut right to the chase: “Where was the baby buried at?”

  Tom pointed to the side of a sand hill in a patch of woods. “So we went out there and when we got out there, there was a sign where some digging was, looked like somebody had been digging fish bait, no sign of any grave where it was heaped up at all,” the sheriff said. “So I got over there and kind of stuck a stick around and found the softest place, asked if that was it, he said it was. I made a mark there and then stuck up the stick so I would be able to go back to the same location.”

  The sheriff returned to the gravesite with the coroner and the coroner’s jury.

  “When we dug into the grave, we found the box, down in the bottom of the grave and it was just—we just dug down to the box and then taken the dirt off to where we could remove the lid of the box and then we removed the lid,” said the sheriff.7

  “But when we got to the top of the box, this piece of rope here was just kind of thrown in the box, kind of in a folded-up condition. So we taken that off and the baby was wrapped up in some kind of cloth, looked like some sort of sheeting, old piece of sheet or something. So we taken that off and the baby was in there, had a dress on, a little print dress.”

  Taken to jail, Dickerson worried about his family, and he worried about himself. He wrote a letter to his daughter Tina Mae on October 16, 1937. His spelling was bad, his writing crude, but the letter accurately reflected the desperation that was in the farmer’s heart. “Tinnie, whatever you do, don’t you swear that I am the father of that baby. If you do, they will send me to the electric chair and don’t do it, bee sure you don’t. Dady.”8

  At the trial in January 1938, Dickerson made an unsworn statement to the jury, struggling to see the paper in front of him, telling the jury that his glasses didn’t suit his eyes.

  The farmer did not deny the killing. But he did not address the paternity issue at all, did not address whether he had raped his daughter, Tina Mae.

  “I killed the boy. I don’t deny it,” he said. “I killed it trying to save the scorn and disgrace off my children, the other girls that was at home. I killed it on Wednesday morning, on the morning of the fourth day after it was born. I buried it sometime between daylight and sunup, don’t remember just exactly the time.

  “I ask you gentlemen to have mercy on me for the sake of my children. I have eight children to take care of. I still have eight orphaned children and I have no people for them to stay with or to look after them. And there is only three of them large enough to work any. Gentlemen, I guess you all have some children and pray have mercy on me for their sakes. I pray you have mercy on me.”

  They did not have mercy on him. Tina Mae testified against him forthrightly and courageously despite the shame that must have brought her: Tom raped her, fathered her child, then killed the baby, she told the jury.

  James Paulk, a local undertaker, recounted the day they discovered the boy’s body buried on the sand hill. “Been buried several days,” the undertaker said. “I don’t know just how long, long enough that you couldn’t tell anything about the baby other than it was a white baby. You could tell it was a human being, a white child.”9

  On January 17, 1938, the jury convicted Dickerson and sentenced him to die in the electric chair.

  Dickerson had lived in Ben Hill County for more than thirty years and had deep roots among the farmers in the community. He was able to get four attorneys in Fitzgerald to appeal his death sentence to the Georgia Supreme Court.

  The lawyers raced against the clock.

  If t
he appeal failed, there was also a chance that the governor of Georgia would spare Dickerson’s life. The governor was Ed Rivers.

  5

  A Deadly Bug

  It would be years before the New Deal programs, pushed and promoted mightily by Governor E. D. Rivers, would begin lifting the gray pall of the 1930s in Georgia. It was really not until the United States entered World War II in late 1941 that the Great Depression would start to fade into memory, leaving behind a permanent remnant of fear in the people who survived it, fear that this could always happen again.

  But even when the times were at their darkest, when hopelessness loomed over everything, there were always small bright spots, small moments of happiness and hope. Thousands of people in Atlanta each day would enjoy an inexpensive indulgence, an illegal lottery game that was rampant throughout the city. It was everywhere and, according to police, impossible to exterminate. It was nicknamed the “bug.” Tickets could be purchased over the telephone or on the street. You could bet as little as a penny. The bets were placed on three-digit numbers chosen by the customer. The winning numbers could be found in the next day’s newspaper in the stock tables. It was usually the middle three numbers of daily sales on the New York Bond Exchange. The bug was thus a boon for newspaper circulation.

  “Runners,” also called “writers,” would fill out the tickets, collect the money, and deliver winnings throughout the city, on street corners, at businesses, or even at the customers’ homes. The payoff for a winning ticket was $500 for every dollar bet. Even a 10-cent investment could, therefore, yield $50.1

  But the odds of winning were estimated at one in a thousand, making the bug a safe bet not for the customers but for the lottery men.

  The bug was so accepted around town that when the operators failed to pay up on winning bets, ticket holders felt comfortable enough to call the police and complain. The cops warned callers that they were wasting their time and money with the bug. The odds were so stacked against betters, Atlanta police chief M. A. Hornsby said, that you were lucky to win once every four years. “Even when you win, you are losing.”2

  In the evenings after a long day at work, the bug men could be seen counting their daily receipts in parking lots on Boulevard. Like everything in the South at the time, there were two of everything divided along racial lines: black lottery operators and white lottery operators.

  It was seen as a harmless, victimless vice, but it wasn’t. Organized crime syndicates, many controlled by former bootleggers, took over the lucrative lottery trade. The inevitable violent turf wars ensued. In December 1936, three lottery operators were shot to death on Decatur Street just a few doors down from Atlanta police headquarters.3 Often, after their husbands had been assassinated, the wives of the former lottery kingpins would take over the business. They were known as “lottery widows.”

  The lottery, with its tremendous cash flow, fueled police corruption and, like Prohibition’s ban on the sale of liquor, widespread disregard for the law among the citizenry.

  The kingpin of the Atlanta lottery world was a man named Eddie Guyol, whose bug business was called the Home Company. Guyol, a native of New Orleans, had been around town for years, starting as a tire salesman. He first showed up in the Atlanta newspapers in 1927, accused of striking the manager of the fashionable Peachtree Gardens nightclub in the head with a blackjack.4

  In New Orleans, Guyol, who was described as “small of build and unassuming,” had developed a taste for betting on racehorses. Selling tires just didn’t provide the lifestyle he sought, so he launched a bootleg liquor business out of a downtown hotel and from there moved into the lucrative bug franchise, joining another Atlanta gangster and former bootlegger, Walter Cutcliffe, described as having “a broad winning smile and a pair of large fists.” Their business, the Home Company, would eventually generate nearly a million dollars in annual gross revenue.5

  By 1935, a year before Ed Rivers was elected governor, Guyol was wealthy, living in a large house on Pelham Road, in Atlanta’s fashionable Morningside neighborhood. Guyol and his wife, Myrtle, who was described as dark-haired and attractive, had been married nine years, the second marriage for both. They had no children. Guyol owned two horses, “fast-steppers” that he raced in Miami and New Orleans. He would routinely bet $1,000 on a single horse race. Life was good, perhaps too good for the liking of his bug competitors.

  At 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 23, Guyol and his wife were in their big Graham sedan in the driveway of their home, preparing to go out for an after-dinner drive. The family cook was inside the house, as was an interior decorator, who was installing slipcovers on the furniture. The Guyols’ German shepherd was normally chained in the yard, but he had disappeared mysteriously a few weeks earlier. A white man wearing a dark suit and hat suddenly appeared beside the passenger window and bent down to get a look at Guyol. He then straightened up, and Mrs. Guyol saw that he was holding a “big, dark-looking gun.” The window glass was rolled down and Mrs. Guyol, believing this to be a robbery, fell over on her husband and started removing the rings from her fingers. But this was not a robbery. It was an assassination.

  “Ed, you have it coming it you,” the gunman said, firing a shot into the right side of Guyol’s face, killing him. In his right-hand coat pocket, Guyol had $2,233 in cash, the equivalent of $37,000 in 2014 dollars. After Guyol was shot, the money was discovered scattered on the floorboard of the car.6

  Mrs. Guyol’s first phone call was not to the police but to the White Lantern sandwich shop at Twelfth and Peachtree Streets, where lottery operators, including Cutcliffe, typically congregated. Alerted to the shooting by Mrs. Guyol, Cutcliffe arrived on the scene before the police got there. He put Guyol in the backseat of his Hudson sedan and rushed him to St. Joseph’s Hospital, the weeping Mrs. Guyol sitting in the front seat and leaning over to comfort her husband. It was no use. Guyol was dead.

  Hundreds attended his funeral. Guyol was actually well respected throughout Atlanta because he always paid his bets. Cutcliffe was among the pallbearers. He also offered a $500 reward for Guyol’s killer.

  More than a year later, police had a suspect, a twenty-seven-year-old white man, an Alabama thug named Odie Fluker. He stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed 150 pounds, and had brown eyes and brown hair. Fluker had been arrested for several robberies in Atlanta, all conducted with a .45-caliber automatic pistol. He also had another trade: furniture upholstery.7

  B. D. Hagan, a friend of Fluker’s in Alabama, told police he had loaned Fluker a Colt .45 automatic pistol in Birmingham on April 17, 1935. Furthermore, Hagan told police that before loaning the gun to Fluker, he had fired several shots into a pine tree eight miles from Birmingham. Police found the tree and extracted one of the bullets. A ballistics expert later said it was fired from the same pistol used to kill Guyol. The murder weapon was never recovered. Police even drained the fishpond in Guyol’s yard looking for it. A rumor would later surface that the weapon was buried with Guyol in his coffin.

  Mrs. Guyol told police she had got a good face-to-face look at the killer. The killing was at dusk, but there was a 100-watt lightbulb on at the bottom of the steps where the car was parked. The lighting outside her home was so good that you could read a newspaper by it or even see a hairpin, she later said. The widow remembered one striking feature of the killer: the strangeness of his eyes, which she described as “snake eyes.” She also identified Fluker in a police lineup fourteen months after the crime. Fluker was at that time on the Georgia chain gang, serving time for armed robbery.

  “She looked at me and says, ‘You are the man that killed my husband,’ Fluker said. He replied, “Mrs. Guyol, you are mistaken.”8

  There was one seeming contradiction in Myrtle’s identification. Police said she originally described the killer as short. Fluker, however, at five feet ten inches, was considered tall for the time. Yet she also said the killer bent down to get a look at her husband, an indication that perhaps he was not so short after all.

/>   At trial, Myrtle Guyol described the killing and identified Fluker as the shooter.

  Lottery, what lottery? asked the widow. “I don’t know anything about the lottery business,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of business he [Eddie Guyol] was involved in.”9

  On cross-examination, Myrtle denied that she had killed Eddie herself or had had him killed. She also declined to reveal the value her husband’s estate.

  Testimony revealed that Mrs. Guyol and Cutcliffe had covered expenses for police detectives as they tried to find the killer, even paying for cops to take the bullets, one from the pine tree, the other, which had passed through Eddie’s face, to Washington for a ballistics test. A living gangster and the widow of a dead one were footing the bill to nab the killer. It was not unheard of for family members or friends of a murder victim to help fund police investigations. It was uncommon for the money to be contributed by a known racketeer.

  In a long, rambling, unsworn statement to the jury, Fluker denied the killing, saying he was at the Redmont Hotel in Birmingham attending a meeting of the Upholsterers, Carpet and Linoleum Mechanics’ International Union. Fluker was a member of the union’s Birmingham branch. Fluker stated that he had a conference on the morning of April 23 before the killing with George Fay, the union’s international secretary.10

  And he said he knew nothing about Guyol or the lottery. He did say, however, that Mrs. Guyol’s attorney, Swift Tyler Jr., had offered to have the charges dropped and to help Fluker launch his own business if only he would tell who had hired him to make the hit.

  Tyler told his own version of the story. Fluker requested to see him at the jail and asked the attorney, “If I told the whole story, what could I expect?”

  Tyler said he told Fluker, “That is a matter entirely between the state of Georgia and your lawyers.”11

  He did give Fluker a cigarette. “He said he had the headache and did not have a dime,” said Tyler. “And I gave him a dollar and he knows that.”