Читать книгу Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South - David Rose - Страница 8

And the Negro. Do not forget the Negro. So far as I and my people are concerned the South is Fascist now and always has been … The history of my people will be commensurate with the interminable history of the Jew – only bloodier and more violent.

Benedict Mady Copeland in CARSON McCULLERS,

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)*

At his hilltop home at the upscale end of south Columbus, Gene Hewell was tending his garden. Now sixty-five, he moved smoothly, wielding his hoe without apparent effort, his only concession to the heat and humidity a straw boater. I was sweating the moment I got out of my car, but his breathing was rhythmic, his skin dry. In the distance, the towers used for parachute training at Fort Benning seemed to shimmer above the trees. Gene gestured towards the west. ‘That’s where my great-grandmother worked as a slave,’ he said. ‘On a plantation at a place called Oswichee, in Russell County, Alabama. It was owned by the first W.C. Bradley’s father.’

Gene, the brother of the singer Jo-Jo Benson, owned a men’s fashion store on Broadway, the Movin’ Man – the first, and for many years the only, black-owned business on the street. Inside his house, in the welcome cool of his living room, Gene eased himself into a sofa beside an impressive collection of guitars. Like his brother, he had lived in Columbus or Phenix City for most of his life, and his family had been in the district for much longer than that.

‘My great-grandmother told my grandma about the day they freed the slaves, and she told me and Jo-Jo,’ Gene said. ‘She said that she was out in the fields, chopping cotton – chopping at the stalks to let the plants get more nutrients. Then she heard this noise. A crackling, was how she explained it. She looked up at the ridge above the field where she was working and all she could see was a blue line of white people, running by the master’s house. Some of the people there were trying to shoot at them, and they were trying to get in. She said she’d never seen so many whites killing so many whites.’

Afterwards, with the plantation secure, the Union soldiers called the slaves from the fields in order to tell them that Lincoln had set them free. Addressing a hushed semi-circle of African-Americans in the shade of a tree, an officer read the Emancipation proclamation. As he did so, Gene said, one of his men idly bounced his rifle on the toe of his boot. ‘The gun went off and clean shot off his toe. My great-grandmother pulled his boot off and dressed the wound. Then he pulled it right back on.’

When the federal army left later that afternoon, some of the former slaves followed it, because they were scared of reprisals from whites. According to the oral history handed down among the Chattahoochee Valley’s African-Americans, their fears were justified.

‘My grandma told us that the day after the Yankees left, all down through the woods near the plantations, there were black people nailed to trees,’ Gene said. ‘They were dead, like butchered animals. Instead of being set free, they were killed.’

In the National Archives in Washington DC, in the Georgia section’s records of the federal agency set up to assist the former slaves, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, I found a ledger, compiled regularly from information sent from every county to the state headquarters. Entitled Reports Relating to Murders and Outrages, its pages document what can only be described as the beginning of Georgia’s white terror.

Written in the elegant copperplate of the Victorian bureaucrat, the ledger sets out its accounts of ethnic assault and homicide under logical headings. There are columns for the ‘name of person assaulted or killed’; whether they were white or coloured; the ‘name or person killing or assaulting’, together with their race; whether anything was done to bring the perpetrators to justice; and any further ‘remarks’. In Columbus’s Muscogee County, and the five surrounding counties that today comprise the Chattahoochee judicial circuit, I counted the names of thirty-two victims attacked, most of them fatally, between March 1866 and November 1868. All but one were black. All the named perpetrators were white.

Even before the Civil War, writes W.J. Cash, the law and its institutions were weaker in the South, where slave-owners had displayed ‘an intense distrust of, and, indeed, downright aversion to, any actual authority beyond the barest minimum essential to the existence of the social organism’. In the turmoil of the Reconstruction era after the war’s end, these traditions found expression in a new wave of extralegal violence. ‘At the root of the post-war bloodshed was the refusal of most whites to accept the emancipated slaves’ quest for economic and political power,’ writes W. Fitzhugh Brundage, the historian of lynching in Georgia and Virginia. ‘Freed from the restraints of planter domination, the black man seemed to pose a new and greater threat to whites. During a period when blacks seemed to mock the social order and commonly understood rules of conduct, whites turned to violence to restore their supremacy.’

The details of these forgotten killings were not always recorded, although some bring to mind the later, more famous wave of lynching that swept the South from the 1880s on. One example took place in Harris County, just to the north of Columbus, now the site of rich dormitory suburbs, where the body of Jordan Nelson was found in June 1866, ‘in the woods, hanging by the neck’. But from the beginning, many such murders seem to have displayed a degree of organisation, a coordinated premeditation that revealed their underlying purpose. The Ku Klux Klan did not spread to Georgia from its home state of Tennessee until 1868. But the racist vigilantism that the Klan embodied was already in evidence when the Freedmen’s Bureau ledger opened its record in March 1866. On the fifteenth day of the month, an African-American named only as Samuel was ‘shot in bed by party of white men, organized’ in Talbotton, east of Columbus. His unknown killers, says the Freedmen’s Bureau ledger, called themselves ‘regulators’.

The bare accounts contained in the ledger also convey what must have been a terrifying sense of randomness, an absence of motive other than race which must, all too rationally, have led any black person to feel they were at risk. In Harris County in August 1866, an unnamed black woman ‘was beaten by a white man by the name of Spicy. She died next day, and he escaped.’ ‘There was no cause for the assault,’ the ledger states of the shooting of K. Hocut by Nathaniel Fuller in Muscogee County on 20 January 1868. Of the slaying of Samuel Clemins in Harris County by ‘unknown whites’ on 7 September 1868, it records: ‘Clemins was murdered by four white men because he had sent his son away to avoid a whipping.’ Hiram McFir died in the same county at the hands of Bud Vines five days later. ‘Vines shot McFir while holding his horse,’ says the ledger, ‘without the least cause.’ As for Tom Joiner, he was stabbed by Jesse Bennett in Troup County on 17 September ‘for refusing to let his dog fight’.

The national politics of the late 1860s were dominated by the struggle over ‘radical Reconstruction’, the attempt by the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, to persuade the former slave states to ratify new amendments to the Constitution – the Fifteenth, enshrining black citizens’ right to vote, and the Fourteenth, which promises ‘equal protection under the laws’. In and around Columbus, the absence of such protection was manifest. According to the ledger, only one of the perpetrators in the region’s thirty-two listed attacks was convicted and sentenced in court, a man named John Simpson, who killed Sammy Sapp in Muscogee County on 27 November 1867. Simpson, however, who was ‘tried, found guilty and sentenced to hang’, was ‘coloured’. Where white perpetrators were concerned, the outcomes of the cases described in the preceding paragraph typify the rest. K. Hocut’s killer, Nathaniel Fuller, was at least tried, but was acquitted. Although an inquest was held into the murder of Samuel Clemins, ‘no further action was taken by the civil authority’. Likewise, ‘the authorities have taken no action’ against Bud Vines, the man who shot Hiram McFir, and Vines ‘is supposed to be in Alabama’. The Freedmen’s Bureau officer who recorded the stabbing of Tom Joiner by Jesse Bennett knew that Bennett ‘lives near LaGrange’, but in his case too, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authorities’.

One of the most odious aspects to the ethnic terror of the 1860s was the maiming and murder of African-Americans by the same individuals who had once owned them as property, and who seemed unable to adjust to the fact that if they still wished to put their former slaves to work, they would have to pay them. The first such case recorded in the ledger dates from July 1866, when an unnamed coloured man from Talbotton was ‘shot by his employer’. When Andrew Rawick stabbed John Brown in Troup County on 3 July 1868, ‘the difficulty originated about some work’, and when Austin and Dennis Hawley were ‘severely cut with [a] knife’ in Harris County two months later, it was because ‘the Hawleys demanded a settlement for work [they had] done’. In the same county on 20 October, Isaac Smith was killed by three unknown white men because he had ‘left a [work] place in the spring’.

Two brothers from Harris County, William and Lewis Grady, appear to have taken special pains to exact vengeance from their former human property. On 4 August 1868 they ‘whipped very severely’ a man named David Grady; the fact that he shared their last name suggests that he had been their slave. The reason, states the ledger, was that ‘David had left [their] place because he did not get enough to eat.’ In this case, warrants were issued for William and Lewis Grady to attend court, but they did not answer them. A month later they again revealed their contempt for the law when they ‘shot and very severely whipped’ another African-American who bore their name, George Grady. As usual, ‘no action [was] taken by the civil authority’. When the ledger closed at the end of 1868, the Grady brothers were still living with impunity a few miles north of Columbus in Harris County, Georgia.

A pattern that would last many decades was beginning: racial violence and inequalities were simply matters beyond the rule of law. Long after the end of the 1860s, the fact that the law did not treat the races equally was among the first lessons black parents taught their children.

‘Sassing,’ said Gene Hewell, ‘you know what that means? To be rude, disrespectful. Our parents warned us about sassing from the cradle up. That didn’t just mean being careful what you said. It meant, you don’t mess with white people; you don’t talk to them, and you don’t talk back. If they do something you don’t like, you get out of their way. You could be walking down Broadway and if three white people came towards you, you got off the kerb. And if you didn’t, they could make it real ugly for you – arrest you, beat your brains out in jail.’

In 1950, Gene said, a favourite uncle, ‘a big, muscular guy’, was murdered after getting into some kind of trouble with a white grocer – ‘They said he’d sassed him.’ After his death, his body was laid across the railroad tracks, and ‘cut up and pushed in pieces along the bridge towards Phenix City’.

This climate of fear and vulnerability allowed other kinds of oppression and exploitation to flourish.

‘We’d come out of slavery, but we had to find a place to stay, and they owned the houses. You had to buy clothes, and they owned the stores. You had just about enough chump change to feed your children and go back to work each Monday. If you didn’t like your job, you couldn’t quit at one place and find work at another. That was blue-collar slavery.’

The story of Gene’s own liberation, of how he came to buy his own downtown store and made it succeed, was a long saga of struggle against prejudice and hostility, against banks which refused to lend him money, and a Police Department that twice tried to ruin him by laying bogus charges – once for theft, and on another occasion for possessing planted drugs.

For a few months before and after the end of 1977, at the time of the stocking stranglings, he’d employed a man named Carlton Gary, first as a sales assistant, and then as a TV advertisement model. ‘It was the Superfly era when clothes were flamboyant. Big boots, tassels, silk shirts and hats,’ Hewell said. ‘I used Carlton for the simple reason that he looked good. Real good. He was a very well built, extraordinarily attractive man, and he knew how to move, you know what I’m saying? He was a charmer, and when it came to women, he had the pick of the litter.’

‘How often did you show your adverts?’ I asked.

‘At busy times, like the weeks before Christmas, Carlton would have been appearing in five TV spots a night. I guess that made him kind of easy to recognise.’ Nine years after working for Hewell, Gary would find himself standing trial for the Columbus stocking stranglings.

The rapes and murders of Florence Scheible and Martha Thurmond in October 1977, followed by Carl Cannon’s exposure of the CPD’s incompetence, plunged Columbus into a new abyss of fear. More than two decades later, in his chambers in the Government Center tower, I met Andrew Prather, a State Court judge who had lived alone in Wynnton at the time of the murders. Despite the belief that the killer was black, he said, any single man was regarded as a possible suspect: ‘There was a police car parked outside and I knew they were watching me. I thought of moving to Atlanta but then I thought, “What if I leave town and the killings stop?”’

One night he found an old lady’s dog in the street. ‘I was scared to give it back. I thought I was going to get shot. I yelled through the door, “It’s Andy Prather! I live down the street and I’ve got your puppy!”’ His fears were well founded. In one reported incident, a woman fired a pistol through her glass front door when she saw the shadow of a friend and neighbour who was calling to check her well-being.

As the police stumbled to make progress, they asked for help from the famous FBI criminal psychology profile expert, Robert K. Ressler. In his memoirs, Ressler writes of attending a social gathering during his visit: ‘A group of middle-aged and elderly women were at a party together, and the main topic of conversation was the mysterious series of killings. At one point in the evening, in a demonstration of how completely the fear of the killer had gripped the city, seven of the women guests emptied their purses, revealing seven handguns that fell out on to the carpet.’ Meanwhile, the local media advised single and widowed women to move in with male relatives, and if that were not possible, to form ‘communes’ for their own protection.

Aware that he and his colleagues had no suspect, Detective Richard Smith and his partner, Frank Simon, decided to try prevention. Before the murders began, Smith had been responsible for a programme designed to protect store-owners from robbery – the Columbus Anti-Robbery Enforcement System, or CARES. Possible targets were identified, and then equipped with panic button hotlines to the police, who were supposed to respond immediately.

‘Now,’ said Smith in his New York office, gazing into the middle distance through a mist over Central Park, ‘I had to profile the elderly women and widows who lived alone in Wynnton, then go to them and tell them, as if they didn’t already know, that they were likely victims of the strangler. The harder task was to convince them that they were going to be safe, that we were going to protect them. They didn’t have family, so we were it.’

Smith fitted dozens of these possible victims’ homes with alarms activated by panic buttons and pressure pads placed under the carpets outside their bedrooms. ‘They were very expensive units, hooked directly up to police radio bands. Unfortunately, the only result was very, very many false alarms.’ Time and again, a woman would hear something, then press her button almost reflexively. Some did it so often that the police had to take their alarms away.

‘I got to know some of those women quite intimately,’ Smith said. ‘What I do remember is that when one of them raised the alarm, what seemed like the whole world of policing would show up within seconds. One night I was on patrol with a guy from the GBI [the Georgia Bureau of Investigation]. A call went out that a guy had heard screaming from the home of his neighbour, a widow. We weren’t more than half a mile away, but by the time we got there, we had to park three blocks from the house, there were so many law-enforcement vehicles there already.’

Working with the help of official records, it took Smith hours of work to produce his list of possible victims.

‘How do you think the strangler managed to carry out his own profiling?’ I asked. ‘How did he work out where elderly women were living alone?’

Smith paused for a long time. ‘We don’t know. Until the day I left the force, I had no idea how he selected his victims.’

Anyone – especially anyone African-American – walking through Wynnton was likely to be stopped and asked to submit to a pro-forma ‘field interview’, with their personal details and movements for the past few days taken down and filed. Some were asked to give saliva and hair samples. Many of those stopped were students, on their way to the black high school in Carver Heights, and when they were questioned again and again, it aroused fierce resentment. However, flooding Wynnton with law-enforcement officers seemed to work.

‘We were not allowed in that neighbourhood – there’s no way that I could have gone through Wynnton after six or seven at night without being jumped on by every police car in the city,’ Gene Hewell said. ‘As a black man, you would have been asking for it – you could have driven through, but even now, twenty-seven years later, you couldn’t walk through without attracting attention.’

Kathy Spano, a courthouse clerk, used to lie in her Wynnton bedroom, her radio tuned to the police communications channel. ‘There were so many people on the alert, constantly moving, responding to alarms, following leads with their dogs. I do not know how they could not have seen any black man in the neighbourhood. It would have been very difficult for him to move around. One night I heard they were chasing someone. Next day I asked how he’d got away. An officer told me they’d found some ground hollowed out beneath a bush.’

Through the end of October, the whole of November and past Christmas, the strangler did not strike. As 1978 approached, Columbus began to hope that the murders had drawn to a close. In fact, the city’s serial killer was about to choose his most prominent target.

If the intermarried Bradleys and Turners are the mightiest of all Columbus’s great families, close behind has been the dynasty of Woodruffs. Founded when George Waldo Woodruff moved south from Connecticut in 1847, the clan of his numerous descendants rose to become financiers, mill-owners, bankers and philanthropists. It was a Woodruff who put together the Columbus syndicate that bought Coca-Cola in 1919, while another later became its chief executive. By the middle of the twentieth century, George C. ‘Kid’ Woodruff, a fanatical sportsman who once coached his beloved University of Georgia football team for just $1 a year, was serving as President of the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, and was one of the city’s most powerful men. After his death his widow, Kathleen, divided her time between a house at the Wynnton end of Buena Vista Road and a mansion in Harris County. As a young woman she had been among the writer Carson McCullers’s closest friends, and lived for a time in Paris. Now her two remaining passions in life were her garden and her grandchildren. In the winter of 1977, she was seventy-four.

Kathleen’s home has since been torn down, but it used to lie in the open, close to the well-lit junction with Wynnton Road, the busiest in the neighbourhood. Through the autumn and early winter, it remained on the list of houses that the CPD had earmarked for regular checks by its special patrols. Shortly before Christmas, these patrols were scaled back, just as they had been after the arrest of Jerome Livas.

The last person to see her alive apart from the strangler was her servant of thirty-three years, Tommie Stevens. At 5 p.m. on 27 December, Mrs Woodruff called her over to where she was sitting at the kitchen table, chequebook at the ready. The next day was Tommie’s birthday, and Kathleen gave her a gift of $20 before Tommie left for her own home in Carver Heights. ‘Next morning, when I came back – I always kept my own key – I unlocked the door and I noticed the light was on in her room, which it always be,’ she told the trial of Carlton Gary almost nine years later. It was between 10 and 11 a.m., and Tommie noticed nothing out of the ordinary. She was surprised that Mrs Woodruff wasn’t yet up, but went into the kitchen to make her some eggs for her breakfast. Only then did it occur to her that her employer ‘was sleeping mighty late’.

‘I decided to go see whether she was asleep,’ Tommie went on, ‘because I felt like she was sleeping late. And so, when I went in the bedroom and seen she was lying on the bed with the, you know, scarf around her neck and about half dressed and blood running down her cheek, and after I saw that, then I ran my hand across to see if she would bat her eyes, and she didn’t. And after that, I ran to the phone and called Mr Woodruff’ – George Junior, Kathleen’s son.

Like the other victims, Kathleen Woodruff had bedroom closets and drawers containing numerous pieces of lingerie, yet she had been strangled with an item that had special meaning for her family – a University of Georgia football scarf. Only two years earlier, she and George Junior (another Georgia alumnus) had been photographed for the cover of the programme for a football game against Clemson University. Inside was an article about George Senior’s playing and coaching career. His uncle, Harry Ernest Woodruff, a brilliant young man who founded the real estate firm which both George Woodruffs (and the still-surviving George Woodruff III) went on to run, had also been on the University of Georgia team. (Harry died aged forty-one in a car crash in 1924, en route to the annual homecoming game between Georgia and the University of Tennessee.)

Kathleen’s body displayed the same signs of strangulation as the other victims’, including the petechial haemorrhages and the fractured hyoid bone. Unlike the earlier victims, she had not been subjected to a massive blow to her head. She had, however, been raped.

Two days after her murder, the enterprising reporter Carl Cannon heaped new humiliation on the CPD in another front-page story for the Columbus Ledger, published under the headline ‘Police Ended Special Patrol 2 Weeks Ago’:

Special Columbus police patrols which had cruised past Kathleen K. Woodruff’s 1811 Buena Vista Road house every night since 25 October were called off two weeks ago because the ‘stocking strangler’ had been silent, police confirmed.

The patrols were resumed Wednesday.

The special details were ordered in late October following the stranglings of two elderly women within four days – the third and fourth stranglings of elderly Columbus women since September.

Columbus waited in horror to see who the next victim would be, and when week after week passed without the dreaded news, many residents turned their thoughts to family, Christmas and other things …

Commander Jim Wetherington, who was in charge of the special details, confirmed they were stopped a little before Christmas. Wetherington said the patrols would resume now.

A police source said that the fruitlessness of the special patrols and the boredom felt by officers was a factor in calling off the special details.

For the first time, the city’s continuing terror was mingled with anger. At a disastrous press conference, Mayor Mickle insisted the police were doing all they could to solve the killings – just as he had already done time and again, the Ledger pointed out, since Ferne Jackson’s death the previous September. ‘We are going to solve this problem,’ Mickle said. ‘We are going to make arrests.’ Next day, the paper published a lengthy attack on Mickle, the CPD and its chief Curtis McClung, in the form of a letter from one E. Jensen:

We the people of Columbus, Georgia are sick! We have a terminal disease called fear, and soon, it will be the death of us all. But the trouble is, it’s justified. My fear stems not so much from the criminal element, but … the ineptness of local law. We are now on centre stage. The world is watching us through the networks. And what do we do? We let the world see our sloppy police work and our praying Mayor! Mickle, get up off your knees and do something!

Stung by the criticism, the CPD tried to mount its own public relations campaign, briefing reporters about the long hours its staff were working and their total commitment to finding the killer. At the behest of Georgia’s Governor, the police were forced to cede their autonomy and set up a joint ‘task force’ with the state-wide detective agency, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Twenty GBI agents and support staff moved into a special office that took up the entire basement of the Government Center, bringing with them Columbus’s first crime computer system. Ronnie Jones, the CPD’s chief homicide detective, told reporters that task force members were making huge personal sacrifices; for his own part, he said he was working up to twenty hours each day, while the strangler had invaded his dreams. For the first time in eight years, Jones revealed, he had gone so far as to disappoint his wife by cancelling their annual wedding anniversary holiday in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

If shared mentalities are partly formed by shared historical memories, among the white citizens, cops and politicians who strove to deal with the stranglings, there was none more potent than the Reconstruction period. Accounts of this era, after the end of the Civil War in 1865, in the local histories of Columbus describe it in extravagant language, suggesting that until the stranglings, Reconstruction had been the city’s deepest wound. They are, of course, written from a white perspective. On the violence and death meted out to African-Americans, the Columbus histories are silent. In their pages, post-war lawlessness and injustice in the South involved whites only as victims.

Like the Lost Cause legend, this narrative, with its wayward, marauding Negroes, ‘carpet bagger’ Northern radicals and ‘scalawag’ Southern collaborators, is not unique to Columbus. For decades, the myth of punitive vengeance by the Civil War’s victors dominated American historiography, even in the North. Its acceptance helped to legitimise the white supremacist oppression of the Jim Crow era, and was further fuelled by works such as Thomas Dixon’s bestselling 1905 novel, The Clansman. Dixon characterised Reconstruction’s aim of achieving legal equality as ‘an atrocity too monstrous for belief’, using the language of visceral racial hatred. Underlying it was the familiar Southern rape complex. In Dixon’s view, the decision to award the vote to the ‘thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odour’, had rendered every Southern woman at risk of barbaric violation.

In 1914, D.W. Griffith made cinematic history with his film based on Dixon’s book, The Birth of a Nation. Screened at the White House for Woodrow Wilson and the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Edward D White, it depicted a version of Reconstruction that bore only the most distant relationship to the truth. A contemporary scene-by-scene review in Variety provides a representative taste: ‘Soon the newfound freedom of the former slaves leads to rude insolence. Black militiamen take over the streets in a reign of terror. Flashes are shown of helpless white virgins being whisked indoors by lusty black bucks. At a carpetbaggers’ rally, wildly animated blacks carry placards proclaiming EQUAL RIGHTS, EQUAL MARRIAGE.’

Much of the film concerns the efforts of Gus, one such ‘buck’, to defile the innocence of the virginal ‘Little Sister’. Terrified, she tries to flee the pursuing Gus, while the orchestra (in the words of a later critic) ‘plays hootchy-kootchy music with driving tom-tom beats, suggesting … the image of a black penis driving into the vagina of a white virgin’. Just as he is about to catch her, she opts for the preferable fate of tumbling over the edge of a cliff. Needless to say, her death is avenged by the heroic redeemers of the Ku Klux Klan, who lynch Gus against a superimposed image of Little Sister in her coffin. At the film’s climax, a massed Klan cavalry ‘pour over the screen like an Anglo-Saxon Niagara’, to Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.

Across the South, writes the Klan’s historian Wyn Craig Wade, The Birth of a Nation was greeted as a ‘sacred epic’, while the film ‘united white Americans in a vast national drama, convincing them of a past that had never been’. No moving picture had ever achieved a fraction of its audience and impact before. Against this backdrop, Columbus’s parochial, local version of the Reconstruction story is not particularly original, and is somewhat less vivid. But for future race relations in the city, it lacks neither relevance nor power. In paragraphs representative of prevailing white sentiment, Nancy Telfair begins the pertinent chapter of her 1928 History of Columbus, Georgia with a ringing condemnation of the South’s treatment in the immediate wake of defeat in 1865:

Half a million negroes had been given their ‘freedom’, and were drunk with the sound of the word. Thousands of Yankee soldiers had been stationed throughout the state for the purpose of seeing that the negroes received the rights so tumultuously thrust upon them.

Besides these, were the ‘carpet baggers’, who were said to carry their worldly goods in their carpet bags, and the ‘scalawags’, low-class Southerners, who were hand in glove with their Yankee confreres in stirring up racial hatred to result in their own affluence and aggrandizement … there were yet crowds of worthless, lazy darkies in the towns, who lived only by stealing from whites and acted as henchmen for the ‘carpet baggers’ and ‘scalawags’ whose power was constantly increasing.

Reconstruction, adds Etta Blanchard Worsley in her later, but equally unapologetic Columbus on the Chattahoochee, published at the dawn of the civil rights era in 1951, was a time when Northern radicals sought to impose ‘punitive measures’ on the broken South. What were these measures? According to Worsley, the worst was the idea that ‘the Negroes, though uneducated and not long out of darkest Africa, must have the vote’. The Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment ‘took from the states control of their suffrage by bestowing the ballot on the Negro’.

The burning sense of grievance implanted during Reconstruction and magnified in its later retellings had distinct implications for both the rule of law and the idea that the races should be equal under it. The Southern view that parts of the Constitution had been imposed by force, and were therefore illegitimate, had a consequence: decent people could reasonably see the law as something that need not always be obeyed, or as an instrument to be manipulated. Occasionally, even acts of terrible violence that were patently illegal might be justified.

No less a figure than Columbus’s one-time Georgia Supreme Court Justice, Sterling Price Gilbert, expresses these thoughts in his memoir A Georgia Lawyer. Echoing Telfair, he describes Reconstruction as ‘cruel and oppressive’, and continues with a eulogy to the Klan, which he compares to the French Resistance:

These [Reconstruction] measures were often administered in a vindictive manner by incompetent and dishonest adventurers. This situation brought into existence the Ku Klux Klan which operated much like the ‘underground’ in World War Two … it is credited with doing much to restore order and protection to persons and property. The Ku Klux Klan of that day resembled the Vigilantes who operated in the formative days of our Western states and territories. The methods of both were often primitive, but many of the results were good.

Those Klan methods had been described over twelve volumes of testimony to a joint select committee of the two houses of Congress in 1871–72. Established in response to a mass of reports that the Klan had brought large tracts of the South close to anarchy, the committee’s mission was to gather evidence and investigate The Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States. In Georgia, a subcommittee of the parent body sat in Atlanta for several months, unearthing a pattern of rape, intimidation and murder, perpetrated not by freed slaves and Yankees but against them. By 1871, the subcommittee heard, the Klan’s secret and hierarchical terrorist brigades were committing an average of two murders in Georgia each month.

In the city of Columbus, the defining moment of Reconstruction came in March 1868, a period of intense political ferment. Since December 1867, the Georgia Constitutional Convention, the state’s first elected body to include African-Americans, had been sitting in Atlanta. While it deliberated, Georgia remained under federal military rule, a state of affairs expected to last indefinitely, unless and until the state ratified the ‘equal rights’ Fourteenth Amendment. According to the Columbus Daily Sun, the delegates to this ‘black and tan’ Convention consisted of ‘New England outlaws; Sing-Sing convicts; penitentiary felons; and cornfield negroes’.

On 21 March 1868 the Sun reported the founding of the Columbus chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. According to some of the witnesses who testified before the Congressional select committee, the Klan was fostered by the presence in the city of no less a figure than the former Confederate cavalry’s General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had become the Klan’s ‘Grand Wizard’ the previous year. As a military leader, Forrest was renowned for his tactical flair and aggression. He was also an alleged war criminal, accused of the massacre of black Union soldiers at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in April 1864, an event that prompted one survivor to describe him in a letter to a US Senator as a ‘foul fiend in human shape’, a perpetrator of ‘butchery and barbarity’.

As in other towns across the South, the Klan’s arrival in Columbus was heralded by strange placards couched in bizarre, Kabbalistic language, printed on yellow paper in clear black type, and posted on doors and walls throughout the city. Their text read:

K.K.K.

Horrible Sepulchre – Bloody Moon –

Cloudy Moon – Last Hour.

Division No. 71

The Great High Giant commands you. The dark and dismal hour will be soon. Some live today, tomorrow die. Be ye ready. The whetted sword, the bullet red, and the rights are ours. Dare not wear the holy garb of our mystic brotherhood, save in quest of blood. Let the guilty beware!! In the dark caves, in the mountain recesses, everywhere our brotherhood appears. Traitors beware!

By order of

Great Grand Cyclops, G.C.T.

Samivel, G.S.

Over the next few days the Sun named several prominent Republicans and warned: ‘The Ku Klux Klan has arrived, and woe to the degenerate … Something terrible floats on the breeze, and in the dim silences are heard solemn whispers, dire imprecations against the false ones who have proved recreant to their faith and country. Strange mocking anomalies [sic] now fill the air. Look out!’ In its editorial on 27 March, the paper warned ‘scalawags’ and ‘radicals’ to expect ‘terrible doom’.

To General Forrest, the Sun and their local followers, there was no ‘traitor’ hated more than Columbus’s most famous scalawag, George W. Ashburn. Among post-war Southern Republicans, he was as close as any to becoming a national figure. Born in Bertie County, North Carolina, in 1814, he spent part of the 1830s working as an overseer of slaves. When Georgia seceded from the Union in January 1861, Ashburn raised a company of Southerners loyal to the Union and fought with the Northern army, attaining the rank of colonel. After the war he settled in Columbus, and in 1867 ran for election to the Georgia Convention, where he played a large part in drafting the proposed new state constitution, including its bill of rights. Ashburn was also planning to stand for the US Senate, and his speeches were reported on several occasions by the New York Times. According to Worsley, he was ‘a notorious influence among the innocent and ignorant Negroes’, and even before the Convention, had been ‘most offensive to the whites of Columbus’.

Having travelled back to Columbus after the Convention broke up on 17 March, Ashburn took lodgings at the Perry House, a boarding establishment where he had stayed before, but when the owner forced him to leave he moved to a humble shotgun house on the corner of Thirteenth Street and First Avenue. Its other occupants included the Columbus head of the pro-Republican Loyal League, and the house’s owner, a black woman named Hannah Flournoy.

The most detailed contemporary account of what happened next was written up in a dispatch for the New York Tribune on 1 April by the Reverend John H. Caldwell, the presiding Elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church in LaGrange, forty miles to the north. Caldwell was a leading ‘Christian scalawag’, an early white prophet of racial tolerance who worked hard after the war to create a bi-racial church in Georgia. He had even organised special religious camps for freedmen in LaGrange, attended by up to six thousand former slaves. A frequent visitor to Columbus, he was present in the city during the events he described.

A political as well as a religious scalawag, Caldwell addressed a mass meeting of Republicans in the courthouse square on the afternoon of Saturday, 29 March. He pieced together his account of what happened after the meeting by talking with members of the Columbus coroner’s jury:

Between twelve and one o’clock last night a crowd of persons, estimated at from thirty to forty in number, went to the house where Mr Ashburn lodged, surrounded the building, broke open the rear and front doors, and murdered him in his room. He received three fatal shots, one in the head between the eyes, one just below and to the rear of the hip, and another one in the mouth, which ranged upward. His clothing had from ten to fourteen bullet holes in them [sic]. Five persons entered his room and did the murderous deed; the rest were in other parts of the house and yard. The crowd remained from ten to fifteen minutes, during which time no policeman made his appearance. As the murderous crew were dispersing, however, some policemen made their appearance on the opposite side of the street. They could give no account of the affair when examined. This deed was perpetrated on one of the principal streets, in the most public part of the city … all the assassins wore masks, and were well-dressed.

Ashburn’s body was barely cold before those who thought his murder justified began to assail his memory. The Sun’s report the following day was the beginning of a series of claims that would be made in many subsequent accounts, none of which, according to Caldwell, was true. Far from being a cold-blooded political assassination by the Klan or its supporters, the paper said, Ashburn’s murder owed its origins to his own tempestuous nature, and to his habit of waging disputes with members of his own party.

Caldwell protested in his dispatch for the Tribune that the claim that Ashburn’s friends were to blame for his murder was merely an attempt ‘to cover up and confuse the whole affair … everyone in Columbus knows for what purpose these vile insinuations are put out. See how The Sun abuses and traduces the character of poor Ashburn, even while his mangled corpse lies before the very eyes of the editor. Ye people of America, do ye not understand all this?’ In Caldwell’s view, the Sun’s pro-Klan coverage before the killing suggested that its editor ‘knew beforehand what was going to happen’. Now, he went on, Columbus’s advocates of racial equality were overcome with understandable terror. ‘The sudden, horrible, cowardly and brutal murder of Colonel Ashburn, by this infamous band, shows that their purpose is murder. They are bent on midnight assassinations of the darkest, bloodiest and most diabolical character. Union men all over the city now feel that their lives are at every moment in danger. They do not know at what hour of the night they may be massacred in their bed.’

Few other white people saw things quite that way. The Ashburn murder is a perfect example of what the contemporary historian of Southern violence W. Fitzhugh Brundage terms ‘flashpoints of contested memory’, events whose competing accounts have as much to do with ‘power, authority, cultural norms and social interaction as with the act of conserving and recalling information’. In Ashburn’s case, old Dixie, the Klan and the Democrats were soon trouncing their opponents in the propaganda battle. By the time the Congressional Committee heard testimony in the summer and autumn of 1871, Ashburn’s characterisation as an evil-doer largely responsible for his own, richly merited, demise was much more advanced. Some of the witnesses took their cue from Radical Rule, a virulently hostile pamphlet that is thought to have been written by William Chipley, one of the men accused of murdering Ashburn. Its claims and phraseology surfaced repeatedly in their evidence. According to Radical Rule, Ashburn had been remarkable as an overseer ‘only for his cruelty to the slaves’. None other than Henry Lewis Benning, the Columbus attorney and former Confederate General, told the committee that Ashburn ‘was reputed to be a very severe overseer – brutal’. Benning admitted he had never met Ashburn, but happily added further slanders. Again, the influence of Radical Rule, which claimed that Ashburn died ‘in a negro brothel of the lowest order’, is clear. Benning told the committee: ‘After the war was over he joined in with the freedmen, and made himself their especial friend – he was ahead of almost every other white man in showing devotion to their interests. He quit his wife and took up with a negro woman in Columbus, lived with her as his wife (so said reputation) and at a public house at that; I mean a house of prostitution.’

Hannah Flournoy, the black woman who owned Ashburn’s last residence, and who witnessed his murder, also testified. After the shooting, she said, ‘They run me out of Columbus.’ Too frightened to return, she ‘lost everything I had there’. Shortly before Ashburn’s death, she added, she had been given a letter addressed to Ashburn. He opened it in her presence, so that she could see it was ‘a letter by the Ku Klux, with his coffin all drawed on it’.

Trying to rescue Ashburn’s reputation for posterity, Caldwell told the committee that he had known Ashburn for years before the war, ‘and I never heard anything against him’. Far from having been a cruel slave overseer, ‘He was a very clever, kind man, and I never heard anything against him personally.’ In Caldwell’s view, Ashburn fell ‘a martyr to liberty’, having been ‘among the very few men in Georgia who openly resisted the secession mania all through the war’. The experience of serving in the Georgia Convention had tempered his radical views, and he had done his utmost to negotiate political compromise ‘in a subdued and conciliatory spirit to the moment of his death’. Other independent witnesses supported his account.

Caldwell’s efforts were to no avail. In the Columbus histories by Telfair and Worsley, it is the Ashburn depicted in Radical Rule, the divisive, adulterous, former ‘brutal overseer’, whose death is memorialised, not the principled would-be statesman. As late as 1975, in an article on the case for the Georgia Historical Quarterly, Elizabeth Otto Daniell cites the pamphlet produced by Ashburn’s enemies as her source for the statement that he had once been a ‘cruel overseer of slaves’.

Historical events do not become flashpoints of contested memory without good reasons. One of the explanations for the posthumous vilification of G.W. Ashburn is the political struggle of which his murder formed a significant part: the largely successful terrorist campaign to limit or remove the rights of Georgia’s African-Americans. This ‘required’ their most important white Columbus advocate to be demonised, and at the same time to be seen as having acted over many years against their real interests. In Telfair’s phrase, the purpose of Ashburn’s assassination was ‘merely to remove a public menace’. Generations after his death, the guardians of white Southern memory found that the bleakest assessments of his life and character still fitted with their overall view of Reconstruction as a time of Northern cruelty and injustice.

Behind Ashburn’s death was also another agenda, which concerned the matter of his killers. His murder was a scandal of national significance, and the ensuing investigation and eventual trial were widely reported. General William Meade, the former federal commander at Gettysburg who was now in charge of Georgia’s military occupation, appointed two famous detectives to bring the assassins to justice – H.C. Whitley, who had investigated the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln, and William Reed, a veteran of the failed impeachment of Lincoln’s far from radical successor, President Andrew Johnson. During the spring of 1868 they arrested at least twenty-two persons, most of them whites from Columbus, who were said to be men of the utmost respectability. Twelve were eventually charged with the murder, and their trial began at the McPherson barracks in Atlanta on 29 June – not by an ordinary civilian court, but by a military commission, a panel of federal military officers, because Georgia had not yet been readmitted to the Union.

According to contemporary reports in Northern newspapers, the prosecution presented a formidable case. The Cincinnati paper the Commercial claimed, ‘The testimony of the prosecution was crushing – overwhelming, and the cross examination, in the hands of eight illustrations of the Georgia bar … did not in the least damage it.’ The only evidence presented by the defence had been alibis which did not stand scrutiny.

However, by the time this assessment was published at the beginning of August, it was too late. The defendants’ guilt or innocence was no longer at issue. That spring, elections had been held for a new Georgia Assembly, which until now had resisted the Fourteenth ‘equal rights’ Amendment, so prolonging the military occupation. On 21 July, its Democrat diehards abruptly changed their minds and ratified the amendment. The fate of Ashburn’s alleged killers had been settled by an extraordinary deal between Southern white leaders and the federal government, in which the prisoners’ freedom, as Worsley puts it, was ‘Georgia’s reward’. On 24 July, General Meade issued orders to dissolve the military commission. Next morning, the prisoners returned to Columbus, to be met at the railroad station by a large, exultant crowd. In theory they had been released on bail, pending future prosecution by the restored civilian authorities. In practice, there would be no further effort to put them or anyone else on trial.

For the former defendants’ many Southern supporters, it was not enough that they were free: they had to be seen as utterly innocent, as almost-martyred victims of their enemies’ radical zeal. Hence, at one level, the need for the claim that Ashburn might have been killed by African-Americans or white members of his own party: if the Columbus prisoners were innocent, there had to be alternative suspects. Meanwhile, there was another battle for future historical memory to be fought. Upon their release, nine of the prisoners issued a statement, printed next day by the Columbus Sun. It said that the prosecution witnesses had been suborned by ‘torture, bribery and threats’, including the use of the ‘sweatbox’. Meanwhile, the defendants had been held at Fort Pulaski in conditions of inhuman cruelty:

The cells were dark, dangerous, without ventilation, and but four feet by seven. No bed or blankets were furnished. The rations consisted of a slice of pork fat [original italics] three times each week. A piece of bread for each meal, soup for dinner and coffee for breakfast, finished the bill of fare. An old oyster can was given each prisoner, and in this vessel both coffee and soup were served … Refused all communication with their friends, relatives or counsel, they were forced to live in these horrid cells night and day, prostrated by heat, and maddened by myriads of mosquitoes. The calls of nature were attended to in a bucket which was removed but once in twenty-four hours.

In some quarters the prisoners’ allegations were vehemently denied. According to the Cincinnati Commercial, their supporters in Georgia were guilty of ‘moral terrorism’, which ‘made it a crime to entertain any opinion but the one most decided as to the[ir] innocence’. Appalled by the claims of torture and ill-treatment, General Meade issued his own public rebuttal, accusing the Georgia newspapers of making false and exaggerated statements for political purposes, and insisting that they had ‘no foundation’. He ended his remarks with some trenchant comments about the city where Ashburn died: ‘Had the civil authorities acted in good faith and with energy, and made any attempt to ferret out the guilty – or had the people of Columbus evinced or felt any horror of the crime or cooperated in any way in detecting its perpetrators, much that was seemingly harsh and arbitrary might have, and would have been, avoided.’

There were two further layers of significance to the murder of George Ashburn. In a case of the highest importance and profile, positions had been taken not in response to evidence, but on the basis of partisan beliefs and allegiance. And at its end, resolution had not come about through a court’s dispassionate verdict, but through a political deal, itself the result of the vexed and edgy relationship between the Union and the states of the South. Not for the last time in Columbus, the rule of law had been shown to be a contingent, relative concept. Realpolitik had taken precedence over justice.

Even in Georgia, cloudless nights in January bring frosts, and bands of mist that collect in hollows, clinging to the trees. The cold muffles sound. As I walked amid the lanes and shrubbery of Wynnton one evening at the start of 2001, I found it easy to imagine how an intruder might have crept undetected between the pools of shadow, moving in on human prey without so much as the crackle of a twig. Twenty-four years earlier, in the weeks after Kathleen Woodruff’s death, the Columbus police stepped up their patrols again, joined by their many allies. By January 1978, some of the task force officers were giving in to despair, and hinted to reporters that they were beginning to think that the stocking strangler possessed supernatural powers. Trying to catch him, they suggested, was like trying to hunt ‘a will o’the wisp, a ghost’.

If science couldn’t stop the killer, the authorities hoped to rely on sheer numbers. Earnestine Flowers, a childhood friend of Carlton Gary, was working as a Sheriff’s Deputy. ‘There were guys from the hills of Tennessee who knew how to track people; Military Police from Fort Benning; the Ku Klux Klan; people from other Police Departments who wanted to volunteer. We had night lights, people hiding up in trees; that new night vision thing which had just come out; dogs. And yet we were getting so many calls. People were so afraid. I don’t mean only the people who lived there. I was terrified, too. I was out on patrol, shaking with fear. I remember thinking, “I can’t do this, night after night; I gotta get myself assigned as a radio operator. I gotta get myself inside the building!”’

If there was a point when Columbus became immobilised by fear, it came with what law enforcement staff still call the ‘night of the terrors’ – the early hours of 11 February 1978. It began with an attempted burglary at the Wynnton residence of a retired industrial magnate, Abraham Illges. An imposing building, a pastiche of a medieval castle, the Illges house had a drive that opened on to Forest Avenue, in the heart of the territory haunted by the strangler. On 1 January the house had been burgled, and while Mr and Mrs Illges slept, a purse containing her car keys removed from the bed next to hers. Next morning, her Cadillac was missing. The couple then installed a sophisticated alarm system, with a pressure pad under the carpet near the front door, and at 5.15 a.m. on 11 February, someone stepped on it, automatically summoning the police. They arrived within a few minutes, and, in the belief that the burglar might be the strangler, summoned help. As officers, some with sniffer dogs, fanned out through the moonlit trees and gardens, the airwaves were alive with officers’ communications.

Half an hour after the alarm had been raised at the Illges residence, a second, home-made panic buzzer sounded two blocks away on Carter Avenue, inside the bedroom where Fred Burdette, a physician, lay sleeping. His neighbour, Ruth Schwob, a widow of seventy-four who lived alone, had asked him to install an alarm in her own bedroom, wired through to his, so that he might summon help if she were attacked. When the alarm went, Burdette tried to call Mrs Schwob, and listened as her telephone rang without answer. Then, while his wife phoned the police, Burdettte ran to his neighbour’s home. By the time he reached her door, the occupants of several squad cars were already approaching the premises. The first officer to reach Mrs Schwob, Sergeant Richard Gaines, later described what he saw:

I climbed in through the kitchen window, over the kitchen counter, had my flashlight. I started going through the house room by room, without turning on any lights, using only my flashlight. And after about two minutes, I got to the back of the house and looked in through the bedroom door and saw Mrs Schwob, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had a stocking wrapped around her neck; it was hanging down between her legs, also laying on the floor was a screwdriver. Then I went over to where she was and when she saw me she said, ‘I thought you were him coming back.’ And then she said, ‘He’s still here, he’s still in the house.’ And I went over and I checked the necklace – I mean the strangling – the stocking that was wrapped around her neck to make sure it was not too tight, and it was loose.

Gaines and his colleagues checked the rest of the house. But Mrs Schwob was mistaken. The stocking strangler had gone.

The Columbus newspapers published next day, 12 February, warmly celebrated Mrs Schwob’s survival. Like Kathleen Woodruff, she was a very prominent citizen and patron of the arts. For twenty years after the death of her husband, Simon, in 1954, she had continued to run his textile firm, Schwob Manufacturing, and continued as board chairman emeritus until it was sold in 1976. In 1966 she was Columbus’s Woman of the Year, and her other accolades included the local Sertoma Service to Mankind Award. She was, reported the Ledger, ‘credited with almost single-handedly raising more than $500,000 for the $1.5 million fine arts building at Columbus College’, which was named after her husband.

Ruth Schwob, the Ledger said, had survived the attack because she was a regular jogger and unusually fit for her age.

I just awakened and he was there. He was on the bed and had his hand on my throat and wrapped pantyhose all the way around. Then he pulled the thing tightly round my neck. He had a mask on his face, I think he had gloves on, and it was dark in my room. There was no flesh showing, and he never uttered a sound. It was quite a struggle. I fought like a tiger. He choked me so bad, I passed out. I think the police just missed him. I don’t know how long he was in the house or whether he was gone before the police arrived.

After her rescue, the police sealed off the surrounding streets as officers combed the earth for a scent with bloodhounds and a helicopter equipped with floodlights hovered overhead. There were shoe tracks leading from Schwob’s kitchen window, where the strangler had forced his entry with the screwdriver found by her bed. But once again, he escaped. ‘If he doesn’t have knowledge of the area,’ the task force leader Ronnie Jones told the Ledger, ‘then he’s mighty damn lucky.’

Having found Mrs schwob, and having failed to find the strangler, Jones and his staff assumed that he had left the area. In fact, he merely fled two blocks to 1612 Forest Avenue, a house diagonally opposite the Illges castle. It was not until 11.30 in the morning of the following day, 12 February, that Judith Borom called on her way to church to check on the woman who lived there, her mother-in-law Mildred, a lone widow, aged seventy-eight. Earlier that day Judith’s husband, Perry Borom, had been discussing Mildred’s safety with his business partner, George C. Woodruff Junior, Kathleen Woodruff’s son. ‘I was telling him, “I’m really worried about your mama,”’ Woodruff told reporters later. ‘He said he’d sent a man out to put screws in the window to keep it closed.’

Judith was with her three children. She parked her car in the back yard, and rang the back doorbell. There was no answer, but she could hear the television playing. She told her son to go round to the front while she tried to peer into Mildred’s bedroom, at the building’s side. Then she heard the boy screaming: ‘Mama, come here, Mama, come here.’ At the front of the house a plate-glass window had been broken, and the front door was ajar, wedged open with a piece of carpet. Judith called the police. Mildred’s body, raped and strangled with cord from a Venetian blind, was lying on the hall floor. The autopsy reports suggested that she was being murdered at the very time that dozens of police were keeping busy at Ruth Schwob’s house two blocks away, and the bloodhounds and helicopter were conducting their futile search of the neighbourhood.

As usual, the task-force leader Ronnie Jones was among the first on the scene. At the sight of the killer’s sixth victim, he collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Ronald had begun to take it personally,’ Detective Luther Miller, who now took over his responsibilities, later recalled. ‘He felt like it was his responsibility to stop the strangler. He had – we had all been working day and night to protect these women. He started thinking it was his fault each time one was found dead. It was just an emotional breakdown. Chief McClung decided he needed a break.’

The CPD’s relationship with Columbus’s eccentric coroner, Donald Kilgore, remained somewhat strained. On the day after Mildred Borom’s killing, it took another turn for the worse. Fibres found on her body, Kilgore told reporters, were ‘black, Negroid, pubic hairs’. Kilgore, it will be recalled, was a mortician, without scientific training. At the time he made this controversial pronouncement, proper forensic examination of the corpse and the crime scene had barely begun. Presumably, Kilgore had noticed that the hairs were dark and curly.

Four days after the discovery of Mildred Borom’s body, the Columbus police turned for help to the realm of the spirits. At the behest of Detective Commander Herman Boone, two officers took John G. Argeris, a well-known psychic who was said to have helped police solve crimes in New England, on a drive through Wynnton. Argeris, the officers’ report stated, ‘determined that the suspect lives in the area … The suspect was also determined, without a doubt, to be a white male, with large eyes, having a full beard. Suspect either has money or his family is considered well-to-do. Argeris determined that the suspect has the initial “J” … Argeris further stated that “J” should stand for John.’

The pressure on the cops was already almost intolerable, but on 1 March it grew still more severe. Police Chief McClung received a letter, signed ‘Chairman, Forces of Evil’, purportedly a white vigilante group, saying that if the strangler were not caught before the beginning of June, a black woman named Gail Jackson, whom the group had already kidnapped, would be murdered. If the strangler were still at large in September, the letter went on, ‘the victims will double … Don’t think we are bluffing.’ Gail Jackson, it rapidly became apparent, was indeed missing.

With commendable sang froid, McClung separated the ‘Forces of Evil’ investigation from the stranglings case. Eventually, after the receipt of further letters that demanded a $10,000 ransom, the FBI’s psychological profilers suggested that the author of the letters was black, and that Gail Jackson was probably already dead. They were right on both counts. The ‘chairman’ of ‘Forces of Evil’ was an African-American soldier from Fort Benning named William Henry Hance, and he had killed Jackson and two other women. Towards the end of 1978 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Twelve years later he died in Georgia’s electric chair.

Perhaps the night of the terrors scared even the strangler. For his last murder, he moved out of Wynnton, to Steam Mill Road, a mile and a half away. There, on 20 April 1978, eight months after his first attack, he killed Janet Cofer, aged sixty-one, a teacher at an elementary school. Her son, who normally lodged with her, had been away for the evening. And then, without apparent explanation, the stocking stranglings stopped.