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

by David Beasley

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.

  A prison barber shaved the heads of the six men, so that the electrodes attached to the sides of their heads would make clean contact and also to prevent the hair from catching on fire during the execution.

  Willie Russell, convicted of beating to death the Cobb County farmer and his daughter about six weeks earlier, was first.

  Climbing a short flight of stairs, he entered the death chamber at 11:09 a.m. Central Standard Time. He was not handcuffed and walked briskly behind a guard to the chair and sat down.

  “Do you have anything to say?” a prison official asked Russell.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Me and Willie Jones did this. Me and Willie Jones went over to the house.”

  It was Jones whom Russell had blamed, in the final days before the execution, for the killings after Jones had allegedly sold Russell’s radio for $5.

  “I ain’t complaining about what’s happening to me,” Russell continued. “I’m well satisfied with the way it’s turning out. Good-bye to everybody.”

  Russell was quickly strapped into the chair. A slate-red rubber mask was slipped over his head, and atop the mask was placed a metal helmet containing the electrode that would be attached to the side of his head. The wing nuts were tightened to assure a snug fit. Inside the helmet was a sponge, dripping with salt water, that was there to help conduct electricity but also to keep Russell’s head from catching on fire, although sometimes the sponges themselves would alight from the electrical sparks.

  One electrode was attached to the side of Russell’s head, another to his ankle. The switches were thrown at 11:12 a.m. and the generator roared as it belted out 2,000 volts of electricity, ten times more than needed to power a modern kitchen stove, nearly three times more power than it takes to run a modern subway train.

  A person who dies in the electric chair looks as if he has just grabbed a live wire. His body strains, and it appears that without the leather straps holding him in the chair, his body would be sent hurling into the air, which in fact it would.24

  The two doctors pronounced Russell dead at 11:21 a.m., twelve minutes after he entered the death chamber.

  Russell was dead, the first of the six executions completed swiftly and efficiently. But Georgia may have just executed a man who was insane.

  Jones, the man Russell had accused of killing the Cobb County farmer and his daughter, was released from jail a week after Russell’s execution following a court hearing. Jones’s white attorney, Frank Bowers, told a judge that Russell, now dead, had been insane. Bowers could prove that, he told the judge, by calling a physician witness who examined Russell before he was executed.25

  Russell’s own attorneys had never bothered to raise an insanity defense despite their client’s bizarre behavior, his ramblings about killing another black man “down at the river” when no body was ever discovered. Yet Bowers had within a week found witnesses to testify that Russell was indeed insane.

  Had Russell’s own defense attorneys taken the same steps a few weeks earlier, their client might have been spared death in the electric chair on December 9. Governor Ed Rivers had, after all, just commuted the death sentence of a black man, Dennis Paul, after his attorney convinced a state lunacy board to examine his client.

  There was a difference, of course. Paul’s victims were black. Russell had killed a white farmer and the farmer’s daughter. Politically, it would have been much more difficult for Rivers to commute Russell’s death sentence to life, particularly after the murders had led to a riot by angry white citizens. Yet there was always that chance.

  But it was too late now to save Russell. His body was carried to the prison morgue.

  Arthur Mack was next.

  He was one of the two men convicted of killing the night watchman at the Columbus fairgrounds that July night in 1937.

  Mack walked slowly into the chamber at 11:33, “his eyes glazed with religious fervor, his hands clasped in prayer.” A reporter wrote that Mack already appeared to be in another world, having “attained a transport bordering on an ecstatic trance.” In a deep baritone voice, Mack sang spirituals. “With a staff in his hand, God is coming to this land. God is coming to this land, by and by.”

  Mack had received permission to pray before he died, and he did so, placing his knees on the electric chair’s rubber footstool and his head in the unpainted oak seat of the chair.

  He stayed there for two full minutes, praying in “a clear, strong voice,” first the Lord’s Prayer, then his own words.

  “Help those who prosecuted me and give me a home in the Kingdom, oh Jesus.”

  After Mack sat in the electric chair, he continued chanting, “Lord have mercy on my soul, clear me from all sin.”

  “Have you anything to say?” a prison captain asked Mack.

  “Yes sir,” said Mack. “Tell all my friends that they should pray and go to church. Tell them to stay out of trouble.”

  As guards placed the red rubber mask over his face and the metal helmet containing the electrode was clamped over his head, Mack kept chanting. “Have mercy on me, Jesus, Lord. Take care of me when I’m down yonder, Lord.”

  As the electricity surged through Mack’s body, he strained against the leather straps. His prayers were suddenly silent.

  “The pleadings froze on his lips,” a newspaper reporter wrote.26

  It would take two jolts of electricity to kill Mack, who was declared dead at 11:39 a.m. As powerful as the electric chair was, it did not always kill a man on the first shock. Multiple shocks were sometimes necessary to finally extinguish a life.

  Could Mack feel anything between the first and second jolts? That issue would be under debate for decades. It is debated even to this day.

  Arthur Perry, Mack’s co-defendant in the Columbus killing, was next on the list. He was the son of Ruth Perry, who had so desperately fought to save her son since his arrest in July 1937.

  Quietly humming a spiritual, Perry looked out at the witnesses who were sitting in chairs in front of him and watched as guards strapped his arms and legs to the chair. “I wish you all good luck,” he said quietly, and then thanked the guards for how nice they had been to him.

  “I believe the Lord is on my side,” Perry added.

  Perry received two shocks of a minute each, starting at 11:44 a.m. Reporters could easily tell how many shocks each defendant received because the generator would roar each time a new surge of electricity was delivered. Perry was declared dead at 11:52 a.m.

  It was an assembly line of death, and it continued to roll with Jim Henry Williams, one of the three men who had been convicted of killing the Jackson police chief. When asked if he had anything to say, Williams said flatly, “Not a thing.”

  After two shocks, Williams still had a strong pulse. A third shock was required before he died at 12:06 p.m. The state of Georgia had killed four men in an hour. There were only two more to go. It was not going to take three hours after all, far from it.

  Charlie Rucker, another of the Jackson defendants, was next, and as he was being strapped into the chair, he chanted in a “wild tone” a warning to his executioners.

  “I’m gonna tell God how you done me,” he said.

  Yet in his last statement, Rucker had advice for the young people who would follow him. “I don’t want the boys to take the road I took ’cause it was the wrong road.”

  After two shocks, beginning at 12:12 p.m., Rucker was declared dead at 12:17.

  The third of the Jackson trio, Raymond Carter, would be last to die. He entered the death chamber carrying a paperback copy of the New Testament. Spotting one guard, Carter reached over and shook his hand. Then he walked over and sat in the electric chair.

  “I’m guilty of crime,” he said quietly.

  Carter then asked if someone could read a passage from the Bible he was holding. Carter had marked chapter 16, the twenty-fourth verse, of Saint Matt
hew.

  A prison guard, Sgt. W. L. Horne, picked up the Bible and read: “Then Jesus said to his disciples: If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.”

  “Amen,” Carter said. It was this verse, Carter added, that he wanted on his tombstone.

  Carter was pronounced dead at 12:30 p.m. The first man, Russell, had entered the death chamber at 11:09 a.m.

  In eighty-one minutes, Georgia executed Willie Russell, Arthur Mack, Arthur Perry, Jim Henry Williams, Raymond Carter, and Charlie Rucker.

  “Let the other boys out in the world know the message,” Smith, the black Columbus minister, urged reporters after the executions. “There is life only in repentance.”27

  Under Georgia law, the bodies of the six men would be kept in the prison morgue for twenty-four hours. The state would not pay to have the bodies transported back to the prisoners’ home counties.

  The Wednesday before the execution, Ruth Perry had boldly appeared before the Muscogee County commissioners at their weekly meeting and demanded that her son’s body be delivered back to Columbus. The commissioner agreed to cover the cost.28

  After the last of the six bodies was removed from the green death chamber, prisoners in denim uniforms “swept up and mopped up.”29

  Most reporters wrote the story straight: six black men died in the chair and the one white man was spared.

  But a white reporter, Harold Martin of the Atlanta Georgian newspaper, felt the need to provide to his readers, in the second paragraph of his story, a moral justification for the executions he had just witnessed. “It was swift pure justice that struck,” Martin wrote. “It was more civilized, more certain than their deaths could have been in the hands of enraged mobs, who tried in at least one case to take over the reins of justice, but fortunately failed.”30 He was referring to the riots in Smyrna that erupted after Willie Russell was arrested for killing the Cobb County farmer and his daughter.

  Martin observed in his story that an evolution was under way: capital punishment was shifting from mob violence on the streets to the controlled confines of a prison death chamber. It had been taken inside. Martin defined this as progress, but there were those who were deeply troubled by the events of December 9, 1938, when six black men died and one white man was allowed to live.

  “Yesterday was a gloomy day at Tattnall Prison,” a white woman from Sparta, Mrs. E. J. Forrester, wrote Governor Rivers on December 10. “I don’t quite understand why the white man who strangled the innocent baby should have been given a respite of 30 days.”31

  Downing Musgrove, the governor’s assistant, replied, “I agree with you heartily that it was a gloomy day at Tattnall Prison on Friday of last week.”

  Musgrove continued by explaining why Tom Dickerson, the white prisoner, was not executed. “His attorney, along with the members of this man’s family, including several small children, came to Atlanta late at night to talk with the Governor about the possibility of granting a respite,” said Musgrove.32

  This explanation was in sharp contrast to the letter Musgrove wrote to George P. Munroe, the former judge who had defended Mack and Perry. “I regret that the governor was unable to commute the sentences of these two negroes, but under the circumstances it seemed humanly impossible,” Musgrove wrote.

  There were other, more visceral letters to Rivers following the mass execution. On December 19, Phil Anderson, director of the State Board of Penal Administration in Reidsville, forwarded to Musgrove postcards from “negroes in New York.”33

  Anderson mocked the writers for addressing the postcards to “Capital of Georgia, Reidsville,” when Atlanta was in fact the state’s capital city. “As soon as you get ready to move in,” Anderson joked to Musgrove, “advise me in order that I may provide office space.”

  The writers from New York struck an ominous tone in their message to Rivers, portending vengeance from God. “So you let the six blacks die and saved the white,” one wrote. “Well don’t cry for mercy when God sends cyclones and hurricanes to destroy you for those six and other Negroes you take their life without weighing the evidence.”34

  Only the body of Charlie Rucker was claimed by family members within twenty-four hours of the executions. The other five bodies were turned over to the Georgia Anatomical Board for use as medical school cadavers.35 A state law allowed the board to take the unclaimed bodies of paupers and prisoners so that medical schools would no longer have to buy bodies from grave robbers. Records indicate that at Tattnall Prison, the practice of donating corpses to medical schools was limited to black prisoners only. The register of inmate deaths at Tattnall from 1937 to 1941 shows no white bodies were donated for cadaver use during those five years while fifty-three black corpses were taken. Racial discrimination seemed to have no end, even after death.

  The Muscogee County Commission broke its promise to Ruth Perry to transport her son’s body to Columbus, so he was one of those who ended up as a medical school cadaver.

  Raymond Carter did not have a tombstone inscribed with Matthew 16:24. He would not have a Christian burial or a tombstone.

  In less than two months, three of the six men who died on December 9 had been arrested, tried, convicted, executed, and claimed as medical school cadavers.

  In Jackson, Georgia, the pretty town where three of the six black men who died December 9 had allegedly committed their capital crimes, the newspaper dutifully reported the executions.

  It was now time to get back to the peaceful, predictable life that calmly revolved around nature, the harvest, and the seasons.

  “Beautiful Christmas Lights to Be Placed Around the Courthouse Square for Christmas Season,” the Jackson Progress Argus headline announced on December 15, six days after the executions.

  Lights would be placed on three living trees on the courthouse lawn and in every window of the courthouse. There would be Christmas lights “of a different shade which will make a beautiful and pleasing effect.”

  Butts County would provide the lights. The city of Jackson “will have the electrician install the lights and will furnish the current,” the newspaper cheerfully reported.36

  10

  Millionaires in Prison

  Six black men died swiftly in the electric chair on December 9, 1938, but for the white “thrill killers,” George Harsh and Richard Gallogly—wealthy college students sentenced to spend the rest of their lives on the Georgia chain gang for the 1928 murder of a drugstore pharmacist—the cases were prolonged, stretching for more than a decade.

  Harsh and Gallogly never expected to be incarcerated for very long. They thought they would have to serve only a few years.

  Their families had not only money but also influence.

  Harsh and Gallogly had both escaped death in the electric chair in a 1929 plea deal after juries twice failed to agree on a verdict for Gallogly. Harsh had been sentenced to death, but prosecutors agreed to give him life in prison if Gallogly pleaded guilty to murder. Gallogly agreed, believing that he could save both the life of his college friend and his own neck by enduring just a few years of imprisonment. And he was only nineteen years old at the time. After the plea deal, Harsh and Gallogly were both transferred to the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville in early April 1929.1 It was then the state’s only prison and was used as a clearinghouse for inmates before they were assigned to one of the more than one hundred chain gang camps across the state.

  Harsh was transferred to a chain gang in Fulton County in early May 1929, but Gallogly was allowed to linger at Milledgeville after three doctors, one of them his stepfather, Worth E. Yankey, wrote statements that Gallogly was too weak to “perform hard labor on the roads.”2 This would be a pattern. Time and time again, Gallogly’s family would cite his poor health as justification for lighter duty.

  For both the wealthy and the poor, the Georgia chain gang was no joke.

  In his 1932 best-selling book, I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang!, Robert Burns, the white New Jersey man ar
rested in 1922 and sentenced to serve six to ten years on the Georgia chain gang for a robbery that netted him $5.80, shocked the nation when he described the brutal conditions. Georgia kept prisoners in cages, rolling them around from work site to work site like circus animals as they performed grueling, backbreaking manual labor, Burns wrote.

  On June 21, 1922, Burns managed to escape from the chain gang, and he built a new, respectable life as a Chicago magazine publisher, but in May 1929, his jilted wife turned him in.

  As Georgia began extradition proceedings to return Burns to the chain gang, he hired William Schley Howard, the same Atlanta lawyer who had represented George Harsh at trial.

  Howard worked out a deal to buy a pardon from the Georgia Prison Commission, Burns would later write. Burns would need to raise a total of $2,500. Howard would receive $1,000. Each of the three members of the prison commission would get $500. One member of the commission, Vivian Stanley, even traveled to Chicago and met with Burns. Stanley assured Burns that if he returned voluntarily to Georgia, he would be back home in Chicago within ninety days. Burns even entertained Stanley while he was in town, taking him to a “famous Chicago night club.”

  Burns rode with Stanley on the train back to Atlanta and hoped he would be behind bars for only a few months. Yet after meeting with Howard, his attorney in Atlanta, Burns was worried. Howard was now saying it could be up to a year before he was released.

  “You are in Georgia now and things will have to be handled the Georgia way,” Howard said.

  Meanwhile, Burns wrote a check for $700 to Howard for his legal fee and $350 to the Campbell County commissioners to cover the cost of extraditing him from Illinois.

  Burns was taken to the Campbell County chain gang south of Atlanta, seven years and five days after his first escape.

  On July 29, 1929, one of Burns’s attorneys, John Echols, arrived at the Campbell camp and told his client that the prison commissioners were meeting on his case in nine days and it was “customary for them to receive some gratuity when recommending a convict for parole.” Echols told Burns that $500 was needed that day. Burns didn’t have that much but could raise it in Chicago if given a few days. That was a deal breaker. That same night, Burns was transferred to another work camp, this one in Troup County. It was the toughest camp in the state. It was back to the real chain gang now, rising at 3 a.m., toiling on road work under the hot Georgia sun for thirteen hours a day, swinging a pickax under the watchful eyes of guards with shotguns, all for a $5.80 robbery.3