The star prosecution witness was the grandson, Cecil Pauls, who again identified Russell as the killer.
The jury deliberated less than an hour before finding Russell guilty of murder, with no recommendation for mercy.11 Superior court judge J. H. Hawkins sentenced Russell to die in the electric chair on December 9, 1938, only three weeks away.
Russell was tried, convicted, and sentenced in less than four hours.
His attorneys did not appeal, although it is uncertain why they did not take even the simplest step—a motion for new trial—which would have delayed his execution for months. The few surviving court documents in Cobb County shed no light on this decision. Since there was no appeal, there is no surviving transcript of the short trial.
There is no indication in newspaper reports that defense attorneys raised an insanity defense, despite Russell’s bizarre behavior that night and his imagined murder of another man, perhaps prompted by the powerful, poisonous bootleg liquor so prevalent at the time. In fact, there did not seem to be any defense at all, other than to call Russell himself to the stand for a short, inconclusive statement.
With the murders having sparked riots, how likely would it have been for a juror to vote for acquittal or even mercy? Under today’s legal standards, the trial would likely have been moved away from a community so enraged and violent. Even in 1933, a state judge in Alabama ordered that the retrials of the eight Scottsboro defendants be moved fifty miles away to Decatur, Alabama. The atmosphere in Scottsboro was so tense during the first trial in 1931 that the defendants were escorted by soldiers from the Alabama National Guard.
But there would be no change of venue for the trial of Willie Russell in Cobb County, and there is no evidence that his lawyers asked for one. Cobb County jurors would almost certainly have been sentencing their community to another riot had they rendered a verdict other than the electric chair. And they might well have placed their own lives in danger as well had they shown the slightest sympathy for Russell. Perhaps the defense attorneys did not mount a stronger defense because they saw the futility of Russell’s case, realizing it was dangerously hopeless. But on appeal, there would have been an array of legal issues that could have been raised: exclusion of blacks from jury service, incompetent legal counsel, the lack of a change of venue that forced the trial to be held in an obviously hostile community.
Unless Governor Rivers gave Russell a reprieve, he too was going to die in the electric chair on December 9, 1938.
Only a week after Willie Russell allegedly killed farmer George Camp and his daughter, another Georgia town was hit by murder.
Jackson, Georgia, about fifty miles south of Atlanta, was a peaceful, picturesque town of white-steepled churches and Victorian houses. On the courthouse square there was, like in many southern towns, a monument to the fallen Confederate heroes, “whose undying devotion to duty and self-sacrifice in their country’s service we cherish and whose heroic deeds and patriotism we embalm in stone.”12
There were actually two Confederate veterans and fifteen widows of veterans still alive in Butts County in 1938, each collecting $30 monthly pensions from the state of Georgia. The entire county had only nine thousand people, about 40 percent of whom were black.13
Jackson, the county seat, had the usual merchants selling groceries, hardware, seeds, and clothing. There were drugstores, a weekly newspaper office, and the Dixie Movie Theater, which in October 1938 featured Billy the Kid Returns starring Roy Rogers. Tickets were 10 cents for the matinee and 25 cents for the evening show.
The crops had been picked and the air was cool and crisp, so it was time to enjoy the fruits of the harvest, the rewards of a society closely tied to the earth, its rhythms and tempo dictated by the seasons: hard work in the spring and summer and relative rest in the fall and winter. There was time for hunting and fishing now. “The possum hunters say that there has never been a crop of game like this,” a columnist wrote in the Jackson Progress Argus newspaper. “Every hunter with a tree hound is having good luck despite dry weather. One group treed 19 possums in one night last week!”
There was the Butts County Fair, where young members of 4-H clubs displayed their mules and horses, calves and pigs. Schoolchildren marched in a parade. There was a fiddlers’ convention at the courthouse. Albert Maddox won the award for the best peck of sweet potatoes. F. S. Lunsford brought home the prize for having the best half gallon of okra. There were awards for best collard greens and cabbage, pomegranates, chickens, wheat, cotton, beans, and even clover. And of course there were pickles, jellies, relishes, candies, cakes, and pies.
There were signs that the horrible Great Depression was easing. “Business is reported as improving and automobile factories are calling more men back to work,” the Jackson Progress Argus reported. “It is an encouraging sign.”14
* * *
The New Deal had been good to Butts County and Jackson, paying for a new county jail, schools, and a post office, which would be later adorned with a mural titled Cotton from Field to Mill by the artist Philip Evergood, thanks to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration.
Under the pro–New Deal administration of Governor Ed Rivers, Georgia school students were now provided with free textbooks, purchased by the state at bulk prices. Previously, parents had to pay full retail prices for books or buy used books from neighbors, and thousands of children routinely stayed home from school rather than face the embarrassment of attending class without books. Rivers had never convinced the state board of education to purchase eight hundred thousand Bibles for public schools, but he had been right that free textbooks would lower Georgia’s school dropout rate. School enrollment across the state began to surge after the textbook program was implemented, which was a two-edged sword, since more students meant a more educated population but also higher book costs for the state.
Under Rivers, Georgia imposed a minimum seven-month school year. In many counties, schools had been open only three to six months a year. The counties simply could not afford to stay open any longer than that. Under the Rivers administration, Georgia also enacted minimum teacher salaries ranging from $25 per month to $80 per month, based on experience. That was still lower than Tennessee’s $120-per-month maximum, Rivers noted. But it was progress for Georgia.
Georgians could now get tested and treated for malaria, which had once been largely confined to coastal areas of the state but was now spreading northward. They could get treatment for venereal disease, with drugs provided at no charge to the poor.
“The shots will make you feel better and live longer,” read a Georgia Department of Health advisory to patients with syphilis, or “bad blood” as it was called in Georgia. “Your sickness is catching,” the pamphlet further stated. “Take the shots every week so you will not give the bad blood to your wife, husband, children or friends. If the shot makes your arm sore, soak it in hot water for one hour morning or night.”
Finally, the state warned patients, “There are no shortcuts to a cure. At least a year of treatment is necessary to make you well.”15
Health was both a humanitarian and an economic issue, Rivers stressed, because people could not work when they were sick.16 Yet, there were fears in Jackson that the New Deal was creating an entitlement society. The federal government was paying cotton farmers to take acreage out of production and there were worries that young people would increasingly abandon the country towns for cities.
The town of Jackson was about to be the next victim in this strange and violent fall of 1938.
Early in the evening on Tuesday, October 25, a white Jackson merchant, H. W. Turner, had returned from Atlanta with a load of goods for his store. As Turner prepared to close for the night, three black men entered the store. One told Turner he wanted to buy a pair of shoes, but did not purchase anything. The men finally left, but they had made Turner suspicious, so he called the Jackson police chief, C. T. Thornton. The chief tracked down the three men on Second Street near the office of a physician, Dr. Mary J.
Edwards. As Thornton began searching the men, one pulled out a pistol and shot the police chief in the heart, killing him almost instantly. The three men fled into the darkness.17
Quickly a posse was formed with hundreds of police officers and private citizens from surrounding cities and counties. They used bloodhounds to help in the search.
At 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, just a few hours after the shooting, police stopped a 1931 Chevrolet at a roadblock outside the nearby town of Griffin. Inside were four black men and one black woman. One of the black men, Jim Williams, who was only twenty years old, jumped out of the car and ran into a nearby swamp. He was soon captured, and police said he confessed to firing the fatal shot that killed the Jackson police chief.18
The other two men who were with him during the killing, who had allegedly been milling around Turner’s store in Jackson, were identified as Charlie Rucker, eighteen, and Raymond Carter, twenty-five. Lucius Adkins, twenty-eight, and his wife, Mattie, twenty-four, were not present during the Jackson shooting, police said. Their only role had been to give Rucker, Williams, and Carter a ride to and from Jackson.
Police said all five confessed to participating in a burglary ring.
They were taken to the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta for “safe keeping,” the Jackson Progress Argus reported, while noting that the local Butts County Jail, built by the New Deal’s Public Works Administration, was only two years old and was a “substantial two-story brick building.” Once again, the challenge for law enforcement officers was to keep the defendants alive long enough for a trial.19
Thornton was buried on Thursday, with services in the First Baptist Church in Jackson. The police chief left behind a widow and two daughters. Scores of police officers attended the funeral. Meanwhile, a $150 reward offered by the Butts County commissioners for the capture of Thornton’s killer went to the police chief of Griffin, Stanley Harper.
On the Sunday after the killing, police brought the merchant, Turner, to Atlanta, where he identified Williams, Carter, and Rucker as the men who were acting suspiciously in the store. He could not identify which one of the three men shot Thornton.
Thornton was buried with the bullet still inside his heart. Investigators did not feel it necessary to remove it, since they had a confession from Williams and the pistol allegedly used in the killing, which was recovered at the scene of the crime.
Williams, Rucker, and Carter were tried together on Wednesday, November 9, barely two weeks after the killing. The courtroom was packed. Four state troopers along with local police stood guard.20
The men were represented by two white court-appointed attorneys, A. M. Zellner of Forsyth and J. T. Moore of Jackson. Zellner moved to quash the indictment on the grounds that it charged five people with the killing but only one pistol was recovered. Judge Ogden Persons overruled the motion. Under Georgia law, all five of the suspects could be found guilty of the murder as accomplices, even if they did not fire the fatal shot.
Law enforcement officers testified that the three men had confessed to a string of burglaries. And Butts County sheriff G. T. Thurston testified that Williams had admitted shooting the police chief.
There appeared to be little or no effort by the defense lawyers.
Although there is no trial transcript available because there was no appeal, newspaper reports do not mention a single defense witness. “The defendants made no statement nor did their counsel interrogate a single witness,” the Jackson Progress Argus reported.21
The trial lasted less than a full day. The jury deliberated less than twenty minutes before finding Williams, Rucker, and Carter guilty with no recommendation for mercy. Judge Persons sentenced them to die in the electric chair. The defendants “were calm and stoic when sentence was passed on them and seemed not to realize they had no more than thirty days to live,” the Jackson newspaper wrote.22
Yet their attorneys could easily save them from death on December 9, could give them months if not years of life. Appeals of death penalty cases were not automatic in 1938, but they were all but automatic if the defense attorney would only file a brief motion for a new trial. The motion could say almost anything, stating simply that the defendants did not receive a fair trial. The trial judge would then hold a hearing and issue a ruling, and that ruling could then be appealed to the Georgia Supreme Court, which could waive filing fees for indigent defendants. But stopping the clock required having attorneys who cared enough to take that simple step.
There is no record that the attorneys for Williams, Rucker, and Carter filed any motion for a new trial.
The following day, Lucius Adkins and his wife, Mattie, who were charged with driving the getaway car, were tried as well. They were represented by the same two defense attorneys, Zellner and Moore. This time, they called defense witnesses who testified that Lucius Atkins was a man of good character. They called Adkins himself to the stand. He testified that Williams, Rucker, and Carter had paid him 50 cents and some gasoline to drive them from Griffin to Jackson on October 25. The three men wanted to “see some girls and catch a train,” they told Adkins.23
However, Lucy Rucker, the grandmother of Mattie Adkins, told a different story when she took the stand for the prosecution. Rucker, described by the local newspaper as an “aged negress,” testified that Mattie Adkins had on several occasions been forced to accompany the gang members on their burglary trips because they believed that the presence of a woman would make them appear less suspicious. This contradicted Atkins’s testimony that his only role was to provide a ride for 50 cents and some gasoline. Atkins was in fact, according to the grandmother, a member of an active burglary ring. After that testimony, Zellner and Moore moved to drop the charges against Mattie, and prosecutors agreed.
The jury found Lucius Adkins guilty but recommended mercy. He would, therefore, receive life in prison.24
The outcome for Adkins and his wife demonstrated, as had the cases of Arthur Mack and Arthur Perry, who were charged with killing the Columbus security guard at the fairgrounds that hot August night, that with even a halfhearted effort by the defense attorneys, it was possible in Georgia to receive at least a semblance of justice for black defendants. It was possible for an all-white jury to grant mercy to a black man. It was possible for an all-white appellate court to grant a new trial to a black man. But that could not happen if the defense attorneys were indifferent, as they apparently were in the trial of Williams, Rucker, and Carter.
A Butts County grand jury did not see it that way, however. After the trials were over, the grand jury issued a proclamation praising the speedy resolution of the police chief’s murder. “It is our belief that no major crime occurring in Georgia for many a year has been as speedily brought before the bar of justice, ending in one fell stroke a menace to law and order,” the grand jury wrote.25
Williams, Rucker, and Carter were on their way to death in the electric chair. They too were scheduled to die at Tattnall Prison before Christmas, on December 9, 1938, exactly a month after the trial and only six weeks after the police chief’s killing.
9
Eighty-one Minutes
As December 9, 1938, approached, seven men were assembled to die in Georgia’s electric chair at Tattnall Prison near Reidsville, the prison built by the New Deal, the prison built to rid Georgia of its notorious chain gang system, the prison adorned with an optimistic frieze called Rehabilitation.
The weather, dark and drizzly, rain mixing with sleet, matched the grim atmosphere at the prison.
Six of the seven condemned men were black; one was white.
There were the three black men—Jim Williams, Charlie Rucker, and Raymond Carter—who had been convicted a month earlier for killing the police chief in the town of Jackson.
There was Willie Russell, the black construction worker convicted of beating a Cobb County farmer and his daughter to death with an ax handle on the night of October 16, 1938, less than two months earlier.
There were the two black men, Arthur Perry and Arthur M
ack, who had been convicted of stabbing the Columbus security guard to death at the fairgrounds on July 30, 1937.
And there was the only white man in the group, Tom Dickerson, who had killed his daughter’s baby, strangling him to death with a rope in August 1937. Dickerson was the father of the baby he killed, according to testimony by his daughter, who said that Dickerson had raped her and impregnated her, then killed the unnamed baby to avoid disgrace.
Four of the seven men who were scheduled to die on December 9—Williams, Rucker, Carter, and Russell—were here this day only because their lawyers had failed to file even a simple motion for a new trial.
Perry, Mack, and Dickerson had all appealed at least once to the Georgia Supreme Court but lost.
George Harsh and Richard Gallogly, the white and wealthy “thrill killers” convicted of killing a drugstore manager in Atlanta in the fall of 1928, had escaped the death penalty and were serving life sentences in prison work camps, where they were still hoping to win pardons from Governor Ed Rivers.
James M. Williams, the white minister who had lured his son, Grady, from his post on a U.S. Navy ship in Brooklyn and shot him to death in the heart for the life insurance money, also had escaped the death penalty and was serving life in a state prison work camp.
Also in a work camp was Odie Fluker, the white man who had killed an Atlanta lottery kingpin in the driveway of his fashionable Atlanta home in April 1935. Fluker was still appealing his death sentence in the Georgia courts.
If these seven men did indeed die in the electric chair on Friday, December 9, it would break a record for Georgia and would tie the national record, set by Kentucky in 1928, for the most men to die in a single day in the chair. Georgia’s previous record was four. In fact, there were only five holding cells adjoining the fifth-floor death chamber at Tattnall Prison, so two of the seven condemned men had to be housed in cells one floor below.1
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 11