Gallogly briefly served with Burns at a county work camp, where they plotted an escape. But Gallogly was transferred back to Milledgeville before they had a chance to make the attempt. In sharp contrast to the punishment Burns received, Gallogly, the wealthy grandson of powerful newspaper owners, served only a few weeks on the chain gang, and he would spend years in the relative luxury of the state prison in Milledgeville. It was unusual for prisoners to be assigned there for the long term. Usually, inmates were brought there initially, then farmed out to a county chain gang camp.
Milledgeville was an easy prison assignment to begin with, and Gallogly had it much easier than most inmates there. Gallogly was a prison trusty and could come and go at will. A guard once saw Gallogly, two other inmates, and three women at a roadside spot near Milledgeville. They had taken a taxicab there.4 At Milledgeville, Gallogly also met a woman named Vera Hunt, who was a teacher at the Georgia State College for Women. Hunt stood five feet five inches tall and weighed 112 pounds. She had blue-gray eyes, light brown hair, and slightly hollow cheeks. Gallogly and Hunt would marry while he was still behind bars.
In prison, Gallogly also spent a lot of time gambling and drinking liquor. He would bounce around to various county work camps, but the story always seemed to be the same: special treatment. At one camp, he was even allowed to live in the warden’s office.5 Fulton County district attorney John Boykin, who prosecuted Gallogly, would later use the word “coddling” to describe the young man’s treatment in prison.6
Even so, in November 1932, Milledgeville prison officials said Gallogly tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of medicine for an infected foot.7 His stomach was pumped, and he quickly recovered. The next month, the Georgia Prison Commission turned down Gallogly’s first request for parole.8
George Harsh had a much different prison experience. He was not a hometown boy. While Harsh’s relatives were quite wealthy, they did not own a powerful newspaper. Harsh actually spent time in the portable iron cages described by Burns in his book. Harsh would later refer to his fellow inmates as “cage mates,” not cell mates.9 On the chain gang, Harsh was once handcuffed to a post and beaten with a lash, which he described as a heavy leather strap, four feet long and three inches wide. “Because of the thickness of the leather, it was almost as stiff as a board,” Harsh recalled. “It was a terrible weapon in the hands of an angry or sadistic man.”10
While the Georgia legislature had in 1923 outlawed the use of the lash as prisoner punishment, wardens routinely ignored the law. Harsh wrote that the warden once gave him five lashes for no particular reason other than that he thought it would do the inmate some good. The other prisoners gathered around as the warden stepped back two paces and struck Harsh on his bare shoulders with the leather strap, knocking him to the ground, where he stayed for four more blows.
And the warden and guards were not the only brutal ones. The inmates would often prey on each other. Harsh killed a fellow inmate for stealing his store-bought soap, a luxury compared to the lye soap provided by the prison. When Harsh confronted the other prisoner about the theft, he lunged at Harsh with a switchblade. Harsh wrested the weapon away and stabbed the thief to death, the third time he had killed a man. Dozens of inmates witnessed the stabbing, but honoring the code among murderers and thieves, none would tell guards that Harsh was the killer. It cemented Harsh’s reputation in the brutal world of the chain gang. “From then on, I was known as a ‘killer,’ a man who would brook no interference in his private affairs,” Harsh later wrote, “and no one ever again stole a ten-cent cake of soap from me.”11
In 1932, Harsh was transferred to North Camp in Buckhead, a suburb of Atlanta. He became a trusty, and his shackles were removed. He rose in the ranks of the chain gang, eventually winning the job of taking care of the pack of eight bloodhounds, an essential tool to track down escaped prisoners.
Harsh then transitioned from bloodhounds to medicine, helping doctors treat prisoners for venereal disease, one of the massive public health programs launched under the administration of New Deal governor Rivers. Fellow inmates began calling Harsh “doc.” During an ice storm, the prison physician could not get to the camp, so Harsh performed an appendectomy on a prisoner, saving his life. “The essence of the matter was that this old Negro was going to die unless I operated,” Harsh would later write. “I did not care who he was or what he had done—he deserved at least this chance.”
From their sentencing on, efforts to free Harsh and Gallogly were taking place behind the scenes. In late 1932, slightly more than four years after the killings, the Georgia Prison Commission unanimously denied Gallogly’s first request for clemency. The governor at the time, Democrat Richard Russell Jr., could have overturned the recommendation but did not. Russell, who was then only thirty-five years old, was headed to the U.S. Senate. Russell’s successor as governor was Eugene Talmadge, and Gallogly and Harsh had no more luck there. Talmadge was a race-baiting rural populist who even on a good day would have little use politically for two millionaire killers from Atlanta. He boasted that he never carried a county with a streetcar.
The larger issue was that the Atlanta Journal, owned by Gallogly’s family, was an aggressive and respected newspaper and, as any good newspaper would do, paid close attention to the new governor, particularly to the pardons to prisoners he issued by the dozens. Atlanta Journal editor John S. Cohen, a Spanish–American War veteran, was not only an aggressive newspaper editor but a political power broker as well. When U.S. senator W. J. Harris died in April 1932, Governor Russell appointed Cohen to complete the remainder of Harris’s term. At the same time, Russell declared his own candidacy for the Senate seat in the fall elections, which he won handily.
After his brief stint in the U.S. Senate was over, Cohen returned to his job as editor of the Atlanta Journal, where he quickly ran afoul of Talmadge, politically and editorially. Talmadge derisively called the editor “Jake the Jew,” even though Cohen was raised a Christian, his mother’s faith, and was a member of Atlanta’s North Avenue Presbyterian Church.12
As Talmadge was running for a second two-year term in the summer of 1934, his opponent, Claude Pittman, accused the governor of operating a “pardon racket.” Talmadge not only denied that any such racket existed but also accused Cohen and William Schley Howard, Harsh’s attorney, of trying to start one.
Harsh and Gallogly, the “millionaires” in prison, became an issue in the governor’s race. “Jake Cohen and Bill Schley Howard are the men in Georgia close to the millionaires in the chain gang,” Talmadge said. “They’re the ones trying to start a pardon racket.”13
As Talmadge was on his way out of office in the summer of 1936, unable by law to seek a third consecutive two-year term, the Georgia Prison Commission recommended parole for Gallogly, saying he was “extremely young” when the murders occurred, had already served seven years, and that his health was not good.14 Harsh’s lawyers did not petition the prison commission for clemency but asked Talmadge for a pardon. In October 1936, Talmadge refused clemency for both Harsh and Gallogly, saying “both are equally guilty.”15
A few days later, Harsh and another inmate escaped from the Bellwood work camp near Sandy Springs north of Atlanta.16 There was no guard on duty at the camp entrance, and Harsh and Mark “Chicken” Chastain hijacked a truck used for carrying food to chain gang crews. They pushed the truck out of the gates, hopped in, and drove to Atlanta on a joyride. They were captured after the truck ran out of gasoline and was struck by another vehicle. When captured, Harsh and Chastain were drunk and wearing civilian clothes. A judge later tacked three six-month sentences onto Harsh’s life sentence.
There was still hope, however, for an early release for Harsh and Gallogly.
In 1936, Ed Rivers was elected governor, and it seemed to be a new era for Georgia.
However, it was not until May of 1939, more than ten years after the crime, that Rivers held a clemency hearing for Gallogly. Newspaper publishers and politicians turned out
to support Gallogly.17
W. T. Anderson, publisher of the Macon Telegraph, announced that Gallogly’s family had agreed to release a complete list of all fees and payments made in their effort to free the young inmate. This was to make it clear that no bribe or graft or unclean money had been used in the effort.
Gallogly’s attorney was Stonewall H. Dyer of Newnan, the former law partner of Ellis Arnall, who was now, at the age of only thirty-one, the attorney general of Georgia. Dyer issued a statement that he had been paid $500 by Gallogly’s family for his work on obtaining a pardon in 1935 and 1936 and that half of that money had been paid to Arnall, who at the time had been in private law practice.
Witnesses told Rivers, who presided over the hearing personally, that Gallogly was a man of good upbringing. But they warned that Gallogly’s health was not good. In fact, Rivers had allowed Gallogly to spend time in Atlanta’s Crawford Long Hospital for treatment of a sinus infection. The family was allowed to hire a guard to watch Gallogly, paying him $42 a week. At the clemency hearing, it was announced that while in the hospital, Gallogly had married Vera Hunt.
But then the Fulton County district attorney, John Boykin, paraded witnesses who told of special treatment for Gallogly in prison, of women and liquor and gambling.
Wright Burson, who served with Gallogly at the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville in 1933, said that Gallogly had a private apartment at the prison hospital, living in “idleness and luxury.” Gallogly had the best food money could buy and spent his time “reading magazines, listening to the radio and pompadouring,” the inmate said.18
W. F. Brogden, who operated a café and filling station in Springfield, Georgia, near a work camp where Gallogly was once imprisoned, said he and Gallogly went to nearby Savannah with three women and drank “plenty of liquor,” with Gallogly picking up the $70 tab.
There was no denying the special treatment in prison. Even the family members and wardens would not deny it. They all agreed that while a prisoner Gallogly had been driven to Savannah on more than one occasion to meet with family members at a hotel. Gallogly’s, mother, Frances Yankey, said the family was constantly “hounded for money” at the various prison camps. At one camp in Cobb County, she asked if her son could serve under an assumed name, and officials consented, allowing him to be listed as Dick Stephens.
Although he was not up for parole himself, Harsh wrote a letter denying that Gallogly had tried to stop him from entering the drugstore on that night in 1928 when the clerk, Willard Smith, was killed. Harsh and Gallogly were clearly no longer friends even though Gallogly had, arguably, saved Harsh’s life by pleading guilty. They were going their separate ways, taking separate paths in their quest for freedom.
The Atlanta Journal, playing it safe, published Associated Press accounts of the lengthy clemency hearing. Rarely did the Journal version of the AP stories mention the fact that Gallogly’s family owned the newspaper.
Meanwhile, as the clemency hearing proceeded, Gallogly’s new wife, Vera Hunt Gallogly, was arrested for shoplifting in a downtown Atlanta department store. She allegedly stole dresses, lipstick, and rouge valued at $83.20. But there were no press accounts of the arrest during the pardon hearing. John Boykin, the prosecutor, held that card up his sleeve and would unveil it at a strategic time. It was not only an embarrassment to Gallogly’s prominent family but also a potential deal breaker for the pardon. During the hearing, Gallogly had been presented as a changed, mature, and married man who had a wife to support him with a stable home life upon his release. Now the wife was herself an accused felon.
As Rivers pondered Gallogly’s pardon request over the summer, Gallogly remained at Crawford Long Hospital, watched by the family-paid guard. His family claimed he had tuberculosis, but three doctors appointed by Rivers to examine Gallogly could find no evidence of the disease. The most serious problem anyone could detect was a sinus infection.
Finally, in October 1939, Boykin, hoping to preempt the pardon, played his hand. He told Gallogly’s attorneys that he had a confession by Vera Gallogly admitting that she had stolen the merchandise. The prosecutor threatened to release the statement publicly if the pardon campaign continued.19 Suddenly, Gallogly’s pardon application was withdrawn and Rivers’s office ordered Gallogly to be transferred from the cushy surroundings of Crawford Long Hospital, where he had been living for months, to Tattnall Prison, a real prison with bars and locks, where on December 9, 1938, six black men had died in the electric chair in only eighty-one minutes. This was not a makeshift county work camp where a prisoner like Gallogly could have arrangements made for him so that he’d be treated with kid gloves.
Stonewall Dyer, Gallogly’s attorney, tried to get him transferred instead to a work camp in Fulton County, but the county wouldn’t agree to take him. So it was off to real prison now.
Downing Musgrove, Governor Rivers’s executive assistant, ordered Roy Mann, chief inspector of the Georgia penal board, to drive Gallogly to Tattnall Prison in south Georgia, more than two hundred miles from Atlanta. Mann said he wasn’t feeling well so he instructed Joe Freeman, a new hire who had never before transported a prisoner, and R. A. Matthews, the family-paid guard, to take Gallogly to Tattnall. Gallogly was being hauled off to prison but he managed to dress well, wearing a light gray felt hat, a gray herringbone suit, two-tone gray shoes, and a white shirt.20
Gallogly’s new wife and his mother were allowed to go along for the ride in Mann’s car, a green four-door, six-cylinder 1938 Studebaker. Vera Gallogly had dressed well for the trip. She wore a black silk dress with a pleated skirt, a short black jacket, a pillbox hat, and high-heeled pumps.
One of the two guards, Matthews, had a gun. It was a pistol belonging to Gallogly’s mother, Frances Yankey, who complained to the guard that it was too heavy and often asked him to carry it for her. Mrs. Yankey had developed a motherly feeling toward Matthews, buying him clothes on several occasions.
The two guards did not search Gallogly, nor did they handcuff him before the prisoner took his place in the backseat, alongside his wife and mother. On the trip to south Georgia, the guards were in the front seat, Freeman driving. Then a few hours south of Atlanta near a town called Summit in Emanuel County, Gallogly suddenly pulled what appeared to be a pistol and ordered the two guards to get out of the car with their hands up.21 The guards complied, and Gallogly’s mother decided that she would exit the car as well. Gallogly pleaded with her to join the escape but she refused. Gallogly and his wife then drove away but circled back twice, pleading again with his mother to come with them. She again refused. The guards did nothing, even though one of them, Matthews, was armed. Gallogly drove away in the stolen car of the state penal system’s chief inspector, stopping at a nearby gas station to tell the clerk that several people were stranded in the country nearby and needed help.
Gallogly drove first to Atlanta, back to a parking lot across from Crawford Long Hospital, where he and his wife switched cars, leaving the penal inspector’s car behind and driving Vera’s car. They then drove to Anniston, Alabama, where the couple spent the night before making their way to Memphis, then Texarkana, Arkansas, and finally Dallas, where Gallogly had a powerful connection.
In prison, Gallogly had befriended Phil Fox, the former newspaper editor who had been the Ku Klux Klan’s publicity manager and had in the fall of 1923 killed a lawyer for an opposing Klan faction who was on the verge of revealing that Fox had had a series of affairs with “lewd women.” Fox pleaded insanity but was convicted of murder. In 1933, Eugene Talmadge issued a partial pardon that required Fox to stay in Georgia under the custody of Hiram W. Evans, the Klan’s imperial wizard, who gave Fox a job in a printing business with a salary of $70 per month.
Rivers, who succeeded Talmadge as governor, granted Fox a full pardon. Fox returned to Texas, working in the successful gubernatorial campaign of W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a colorful figure who would go on to defeat Lyndon Johnson for the U.S. Senate in 1941.
Arriving in D
allas, Gallogly turned himself in to Sheriff Smoot Schmid.22 He also hired an attorney, Harold Young of Dallas, who had earlier convinced a federal judge to block the extradition of Freeman Burford, a Louisiana man indicted in an oil scandal in that state. Young suggested that Gallogly also hire state senator Jess Martin, a close friend of Governor O’Daniel. Gallogly would fight extradition to Georgia, and it would be Governor O’Daniel who would decide the case.
Back in Atlanta, authorities said that inside the penal inspector’s car, which Gallogly had stolen and driven back to Atlanta, they found a Georgia driver’s license in Gallogly’s name, listing his grandmother’s Peachtree Road address. The license was issued in 1938. Embarrassed that Gallogly had found a way to secure a driver’s license while serving a prison term, prison officials insisted that it had to be a fake.23
Rivers, meanwhile, immediately dispatched Attorney General Ellis Arnall to Dallas to fight for Gallogly’s return, despite the fact that Arnall had represented Gallogly in his previous pardon efforts.
For Arnall to now participate in Gallogly’s extradition proceedings in Texas was a conflict of interest if there ever was one. But Arnall did not see it that way. He believed that losing Gallogly to Texas would be such a great embarrassment to Georgia that the legal fight could not be relegated to an assistant attorney general, conflict of interest or not. Arnall also thought his duty to the state at large was greater than protecting a single client from the past.
O’Daniel quickly held a hearing in Austin on whether to extradite Gallogly. Martin, Gallogly’s attorney, immediately moved to have Arnall disqualified because he had previously represented Gallogly and had confidential information that he could now use against his former client. O’Daniel, a former flour salesman, not a lawyer, allowed Arnall to remain on the case.
Without Mercy: The Stunning True Story of Race, Crime, and Corruption in the Deep South Page 14