LAW AND ORDER IN 1916

As time goes by, governments enact ordinances and laws to govern the behavior of their citizens to meet the ever changing mores of the population.   A century ago, the laws of Dublin and the State of Georgia were obviously different than they are today.  Let’s take a trip back in time to a century ago and see what laws were among the most important to the people of Dublin and Laurens County.

In the spring of 1916, the Dublin City Council stopped enforcing a noise ordinance.  The mandatory use of mufflers on motor vehicles, especially larger trucks, was repealed.  The council determined that commercial trucks would not function well with mufflers.  When it was determined that the city’s large fire truck would not be effective with a muffler, the council immediately repealed the ordinance.   After 2 months of booming and bamming vehicles bandying about the town, a massive crowd of aggravated citizens petitioned the city to require vehicle owners to fix their mufflers and bring back the peace and quiet they had once enjoyed.

There was one ordinance that the City of Dublin and Laurens County was not going ignore.  Although the practice is common place and less objectionable today, the opening of any business on a Sunday was strictly forbidden.  Violators could be fined or put out of business. Nothing could be sold on Sunday. No matter how necessary it may have been. No matter how thirsty one was, no matter how one may have needed a smoke, no matter how empty your gas tank was, commerce on Sunday was banned.  Even swimming on Sundays was considered sinful.

One Grand Jury after another made it clear that violators would be prosecuted. Sheriff Watson made weekly Saturday visits to merchants as a friendly reminder to keep the Sabbath holy.  Few merchants voiced objections, for they too, felt the need for a day of rest.

There were times the church folk were incensed due to the lack of enforcement of laws banning immoral activities.  A week before Christmas of 1916, they grew tired of the proliferation of reprehensible resorts of iniquity across the river in East Dublin.  The shooting and beating of Odus Beacham in a “questionable house”  a few days before prompted a legion of Christian soldiers to muster for battle.

After a Sunday morning rally, a posse of prominent laymen, upright church stewards and faithful ministers,  led by First Baptist Church’s Rev. T.W. Callaway, rendezvoused at the courthouse, where they were deputized.  The posse moved out over the bridge setting their sights on the location of an oyster supper and dance.  Only a relatively rare December thunderstorm prevented the wrath of God’s vengeance upon the sinners in what was deemed “the most sensational invasion of a red light district ever held in Georgia.”  On the following Sunday, the Brotherhood of Christian Men regrouped in a mass meeting to plan the Armageddon of the wicked sinners in the county.

The prohibitionists attacked on a second, less violent front, by securing a temporary injunction against the operation of lewd houses. Satisfied for the moment, the Christians sheathed their swords and took a wait and see attitude for the future.

In March of 1916, new prohibition laws were put into effect.  The following two weeks were the quietest ever known in Dublin.  It was the first time in anyone’s memory that no one was seen drunk in public. Court recorders were shocked when no one on the usual list of public drunks were on Judge Jule Greene’s Monday morning docket.

Although the number of incoming shipments of whiskey were the same, the volume of spirits decreased between 50 and 75 percent below the pre-prohibition levels.  A newspaper man commented, “One of the saddest crowds seen here yet was a bunch who did not get to the Express Office on Saturday evening in time to get their drinks before it closed.”  Deliveries were limited to 2 quarts, whereas before half of the people ordered 4 quarts and the other half accepted deliveries of 8 to 12 quarts.

The prohibition laws also affected the work of the grand jury clerks. One was out of work and the typical grand jury sessions were cut in half.

Despite the decline in alcohol related crimes, the lack of prosecution of high misdemeanors and felonies made locals cry out for the abolition of the four-county Dublin Judicial Circuit and the establishment of a one-county circuit for Laurens where the local voters could elect a Solicitor General, whom they presumed would protect his constituents interests in a better manner.

Humans were not the sole committers of crimes against people and property in Dublin.  There were so many rats in Dublin that merchants were actually considering hiring a pied piper to lead the gnawing rodents out of town down East Jackson Street and into the Oconee River.  The City Council appointed a special rat extermination committee headed by D.S. Brandon.  Local merchants were aghast at the estimated loss of 10 to 15 thousand dollars in lost merchandise each year.  City officials were fiercely intent on punishing the varmints, mandating the deathly penalty for their ghastly crimes.

Just as bothersome were the enormous amount of stray chickens which were roaming about the streets of town doing damage to home gardens all over town.  The county began studying an ordinance to keep the fowls in their own yards.  Any stray chickens were subject to the extreme punishment of drawing and quartering when they ran afoul of the new law.

Both state and county lawmen had to deal with another animal which was aiding and abetting criminal activity.  When Deputy Revenue Collectors S.M. Moye and E.C. Pierce and Sheriff Clark approached a suspected liquor still site, they found not a single soul guarding the liquor making machine, except for a sow, who was getting soused on the sour mash around the stills.

In 1916, the City of Dublin published the city’s first comprehensive code.  Among the acts considered criminal were tying animals to shade trees, installing a fence gate which swung out onto the street and digging dirt out of the street.  The city mandated that all utility poles be color coded with Western Union poles painted black, Southern Bell painted chocolate brown and the city’s poles painted the obligatory green.  Remember the city furnished electricity in those days.

It was illegal to spit tobacco juice or saliva on the sidewalk or drop a banana peel or peanut hulls on any sidewalk or church floor.  A citizen could sell his or her own old clothes but not the clothes of anyone else.  All boxing and wrestling matches were banned. Operators of traveling shows had to advertise the price of admission at least three days before the performance.  If you were not at least sixteen years of age, you could not be seen on the streets after 10:00 o’clock p.m. without the accompaniment of an adult.  All tramps and vagrants engaged in commerce had to register with the chief of police.

Failure to comply with city ordinances could result in fines or in some cases imprisonment.  For those who were sent to jail, they could be required to work on the street gang.  If any prisoner unreasonably refused to work, he was subject to being whipped by the street boss.

Now is the time to ask ourselves, how would these 1916 lawmakers react if they were  living in today’s world?

BUTCHERY AND GORE IN BALTIMORE

A Case of Untenable Uxoricide

You may ask yourself, Why write an article on East Central Georgia with a headline like this?”   Fifty six years ago this week, a former Dublin woman was murdered and brutally dismembered by her estranged full- time employer and part- time lover.  The untenable uxoricide, described as the most fiendish murder  in the history of Baltimore, made headlines throughout the nation. While all too many such murderers are still haunting our country,   it is important to note that in the last few years before World War II murder was much more common than it is today. Warning! The faint of heart should stop reading now.

Evelyn Byrd New Rice, a former wife of William Brooks Rice, Sr. of Dublin, was a pretty, petite, auburn-haired, brown-eyed mother of two.  Following the couple’s divorce, her husband was awarded custody of their children, Brooks and Jack.  She was last seen in Dublin in January 1938.  Mrs. Rice was married to Robert Finney for several years before the couple parted while Finney was stationed at Fort Screven at Tybee Island.    Mrs. Finney changed her name back to Evelyn Rice and moved to Baltimore to find work. Though she never saw Finney again, Evelyn remained in contact with Rice and her two sons.

Evelyn Byrd New Rice began working as a mind reader and finally  as a bar maid in the East Baltimore bar of Italian immigrant Marcus “Marco” Aurelio Tarquinio.  Tarquinio immigrated to America and joined the Army Corps of Engineers in World War I.    He worked as a tong runner in the Sparrows Point plant of Bethlehem Steel.  In 1937, he opened a bar.  Marco invited Evelyn to move in with him and keep his house.  The couple argued bitterly and regularly.  A neighbor, Mrs. Nizidek urged Evelyn to leave town and return to Georgia to be closer to her children.   In the months before her death, Evelyn wrote Brooks that she was afraid of Marco.

The conflicts between Evelyn and Marco occurred more frequently and became even more vehement.  Marco began to lock Evelyn in a room before leaving the house.  Around midnight of April 14, 1939, the couple got into one of a series of bitter arguments.  Neighbor Frank Peterson heard the fussing from his next door house.  Peterson later told police that they argued for about two hours.  “I heard Evelyn scream and then she stopped.   I didn’t hear anymore so I went to sleep.” Peterson said.  A few days later Peterson asked Marco about Evelyn’s whereabouts. Marco said, “Evelyn’s gone again.”  Peterson responded, “Where?”  “Aw, she‘s got plenty of friends, and she’s been all over eighteen states,” Marco declared.

It was almost dark the following night  when nine-year-old Nicholas Kemper climbed down into a Lombard Street sewer to retrieve his rubber ball.  As he was scanning the floor of the dark and filthy sewer, Nicholas noticed a bundle of newspapers.  Upon a closer examination, the boy discovered a hand protruding from the comic section.   “It’s a hand down here!  It’s a hand,” exclaimed Nicholas.
 
The grocer on the corner heard the boy’s screams and summoned the police. Patrolman Paulk climbed down into the hole and found a second bundle, this one containing one of Evelyn’s lower legs.   An all out search was instituted in the sewers about a block from the Tarquinio home.  Throngs of curiosity seekers and volunteer searchers swarmed the site at the intersection of Lombard and Chapel Streets.  Joe Wosk and Jack Bernsein found a right foot and the other lower leg in a sewer a block away.     Searchers found her internal organs carefully wrapped in recent newspapers as if they had just been purchased from the local meat market.  Evelyn’s blood stained lounging pajamas were discovered in  yet another location the following day. Two days after that, an arm was found cater-cornered from the site of the initial gruesome discovery.  A hospital worker found two-thirds of her torso in a dump next to the Baltimore city hospital.   In the case dubbed “The Torso Murder,” police found the victim of the crime before they knew that she was missing from her home.

A couple of days later,   Marco went to the East Baltimore police precinct to report  Evelyn’s disappearance.   Suspicious of Marco’s culpability in the matter, the police chief sent a couple of men to shadow the barkeeper.   At first, the police conducted a vigorous investigation, but the search soon waned after hundreds of tips from a horde of drunks, eccentrics and amateur sleuths failed to lead police to any clues as to Evelyn’s location.

The Baltimore police arrested Tarquinio on suspicion of murder.    The suspect was interrogated for more than six hours before he confessed to the heinous murder.  Tarquinio told police that the couple had argued mostly over her drinking and other men as they always did.  He admitted that in the heat of the moment he struck Evelyn and that she fell down the stairs into the basement to her death.  The
police conducted a search and surmised that Tarquinio panicked and took Evelyn’s body down into the basement, where he methodically  dissected it and scattered her remains throughout the neighborhood sewers.  The most damning and readily identifiable evidence against Tarquinio was discovered just outside the basement door in a small back yard garden.  Eighteen inches below a  bed of newly blooming tulips and beneath a slab of concrete was the head of the former Peach Festival beauty queen.   The walls of the Tarquinio back yard were lined with onlookers hoping to get a glance of yet another decaying part of Evelyn’s body.  Peering over the fence, Frank Peterson watched police as they excavated Evelyn’s head from the flower bed.  He cried out, “That’s Evelyn.”    Buried beside the tulip bulbs were her two upper arms, two upper thighs and the remainder of her torso.  When police presented the suspect with a typed summary of his confession, he recanted his story and denied any knowledge of the details of his former lover’s murder.  Police gathered Evelyn’s remains in a tub and presented them to Marco.  When questioned as to identity of the mutilated corpse, he responded, “That’s Evelyn, Evelyn Rice.”

Tarquinio was indicted, tried and convicted of the murder of Evelyn Rice.  The State of Maryland demanded the death penalty, but the court sentenced him to life in prison.  For some inexplicable reason, the convicted wife killer was paroled after serving only fifteen years in prison.   He vanished from the community, but according to the terms of parole, he remained in contact with his parole officer, who found him to be a gentle man who adhered to the terms of his parole.

Evelyn’s body was cremated and her ashes were buried in the family plot in Americus.  Her right hand was never found.

MONDAY MORNING MAYHEM IN MONTROSE

The Nightmare Before Christmas

When three chronic criminals invaded the town of Montrose eighty three years ago looking for some extra spending money for the holidays, they didn't find what they looking for.  What they did find was not what they expected to find in the vault of an isolated rural bank.  Despite their repeated efforts to pick up some cold Christmas cash, the yuletide yeggmen were frustrated at every turn.

On a warm early December Monday morning of December 21, 1931, the mayhem in Montrose was about ready to begin.  Town Marshal L.G. English had gone to a room over the depot of the Macon, Dublin and Savannah Railroad to spend the rest of the evening when he heard the sound of a truck outside.  Thinking it was a little unusual, Marshal English went outside where he found three men getting out of their truck near the bank.   

The trio asked the marshal for some water to put in their truck's radiator.  Just then, one of them grabbed him in a stronghold from the rear.   English struggled and managed to pull his pistol from its holster.  Firing two shots into the ground, the marshal hoped that the reports of the gunfire would alert several allies nearby.

The captors grabbed his gun, watch and some of his pocket change before tying English up with a heavy cotton window sash cord.  English was carried to a swamp and dumped on the rain-soaked ground, his feet bound together with his hands tied behind his back and tied to a tree.  One bandit remained to watch English while the other two thieves  raced back to town to blow the bank's safe with no fear of any interference by law enforcement officers.

Little did the burglars know that the Montrose Banking Company was undergoing a voluntary liquidation by agreement of the stockholders during the deep and darkest days of the Great Depression. 

The two burglars broke into the bank through a side window and immediately set out to blow open the vault.  The criminals beat, burned and blew off the outer vault door.   Several holes were drilled with an acetylene torch, stolen from Schofield & Sons in Macon two weeks prior.   The inner door  presented a major obstacle, one that the criminals could not manage to crack open despite the pressure of intense heat which left the metal door red hot several hours later.   The combination lock on the safe was so badly damaged that neither the thieves nor bank officials could open it. A Macon lock smith had to be brought in confirm that the $300.00 inside was still there according to Special Deputy M.V. Pickron.   Disappointed in not being able to get into the main vault, every desk, drawer and cabinet was looted.  The total take, approximately $4.00 in silver coins, foiled the villains, who took off back to the swamp.

When the two main miscreants returned to pick up the guard, English, once again, began to struggle, managing to get off a couple of shots.  Threatened with the loss of life if he continued to resist, Marshal English kept quiet until his captors were out of sight. He finally wiggled free from his bands and walked a two-mile trek back into town in the pitch-black, pre-dawn darkness.  English's shots were heard by several persons, who quickly dismissed the noises as pre-Christmas revelry. 

The suspects, W.S. Elliottt, Grady St. Clair and W.C. Carr, took off toward Macon in a truck which was reported stolen in that city earlier in the evening.   Twiggs County Sheriff Samuel Kitchens enlisted the aid of four Macon city detectives, who were familiar with the trio of thieves.  Before their return to Macon, the trio of crooks, dumped their equipment into a creek after one of tires on their stolen truck went flat. 

Marshall English was of very little help, only being able to identify his guard as a tall thin man.  Bank President W.G. Thompson surveyed the damage and sighed in relief that the bank had  not lost a significant sum of money. Montrose merchant Clint Wade scoured the stores of the town to look for additional burglaries, failing to find any.  Ironically, within a year, Montrose postmaster Wade accidentally took his own life when a gun he placed in his vehicle inadvertently went off and killed him. 

Within two weeks of the Montrose Robbery, a similar string of burglaries took place in Macon.  Macon Police Chief Ben T. Watkins began to suspect the three Montrose suspects.  Based on information obtained in the Macon case, police officials were able to obtain an arrest warrant for Elliott St. Clair, W.C. Carr, Loren Carr and one Grady Sinclair, all of Macon.  Marshal English was able to positively identify Sinclair as one of the three men who attacked him, testifying that it was Sinclair who said, "I reckon you will know me when I see you again!" 

Before the end of January 1932, St. Clair was found guilty of a robbery in Houston County, just as the Laurens County Grand Jury began listening to evidence against him and the others in the bank burglary and the kidnaping of Marshal English.  Within a few weeks, St. Clair found himself on trial in Bibb County and yet again in March. 

Loren Carr was found not guilty in a Bibb County trial of stealing a car used in the theft at Montrose.  W.S. Elliott, who entered a Kentucky reform school at the age of 9, had a twenty year criminal career,  turned state's evidence against Grady Sinclair, admitting to the Bibb County crimes and the Montrose caper.  He admitted that it was the first time that Elliott, who was sentenced to 13-15 years in prison,  and Sinclair had conspired to commit a crime.

J.L. Carr offered to plead guilty to Laurens County Solicitor General Fred Kea by agreeing to two consecutive, five-year prison terms.  The remaining cases against W. S.  Elliott, Grady Sinclair and W.C. Carr, who confessed their crimes,  were dead docketed as all three were already serving substantial sentences in Georgia prisons and headed for the chain gang in White County, Georgia. 

Just a day after Carr was sentenced and the case was closed, Walter Wilson was found dead shot in the heart with a shot gun on yet another Monday mayhem in Montrose.

By the beginning of World War II, W.C. Carr was back in a Bibb County jail on charges of theft.  In late August of 1966, Grady St. Clair, part of a large organized gang of thieves,  committed his last burglary when he was shot by Warner Robins policemen in a burglary of a food store. 

And as Santa's stockings were hung by the chimneys of Montrose with care on , a cool, clear and Christmas night, all was silent and bright in the town of Montrose with no mayhem in sight.

REAL ESTATE TO DIE FOR

An Altering Altercation


For thousands of years men have fought and died for real estate, the right to live on it, the right to own it and the right to control it.  A century ago one such battle took place. It was all over the right to own six hundred acres of land valued at a mere three dollars an acre. This is a story of one such fight, which resulted in two deaths and the alteration of a county line.

J. Letcher Tyre was a prominent Laurens County timberman and saw mill operator. Herschel Tarbutton, Gus Tarbutton and Joe Fluker were all prominent young men in Washington County and were well known in Johnson County, which upon his creation divided Laurens and Washington counties.

During the early decades of the 20th Century, prime timberlands were much in demand, especially tracts with a mixture of hardwoods and pines.  Letcher Tyre had contracted with a Mr. Young to purchase a six hundred acre tract at the far limits of the northern end of Laurens County on the eastern side of the Oconee River.  Tyre executed what was once called a "bond for title," whereby he would pay Young on an installment basis and take fee simple title only upon the completion of all payments due.    According to Young, Tyre defaulted in the payment schedule.  Owing to his desire to remove to South Georgia, Young sought out another buyer, one Herschel Tarbutton of Washington County.
That's when the trouble began.

Tyre maintained that he had a superior right to ownership and possession of the land and  proceeded to conduct logging operations. He hired a crew of hands to erect a saw mill on the site.  Gus Tarbutton had three of Tyre's men arrested for trespassing.   The trial was continued until the November term of court.   Tyre set out to do a little squirrel hunting on a fair skied cool November Saturday morning.

A Mr. Waters' son rode to Joe Fluker's house and told Fluker that Tyre and his men were building shacks on the land and were going to move in a boiler later in the day.  Tarbutton called for his brother Gus and brother-in-law Fluker to ride out to investigate the goings on.  When the trio arrived on the scene, Lee Woodum, one of Tyre's saw mill hands, was sent to find Tyre.  Tyre rushed back to the saw mill site and promptly asked the horsemen, "What can I do for you?"   According to some  witnesses, Herschel Tarbutton began to move around Tyre in a counterclockwise direction, while Gus and Joe moved clockwise to Tyre's right.   "I would not do that on my own premises," Tyre warned.  "That's a damned lie!  You are not on your own place," Herschel Tarbutton retorted.   Tarbutton pulled his .44 caliber pistol and fired it directly into Tyre's abdomen.  Gus Tarbutton got down off his horse.  Some of those present testified that both Gus and Joe fired.  But, it was Herschel's shot that hit the mark, entering his stomach and traveling completely through Tyre's body.  Tyre managed to grab his squirrel gun and get off one shot, a direct hit in Herschel Tarbutton's right eye.  Gus Tarbutton ran off into the woods.

Letcher Tyre, with the aid of his crew, struggled and made it to the neighboring Waters' house, while Gus and Joe begged Tyre's men to take their wounded comrade to a doctor.  Tyre's brother, J.B. Tyre, was summoned to his brother's side.  He found his dying brother in a conscious condition.  Letcher began to speak to those around.  Realizing that his death was eminent, Tyre issued a dying declaration that the Tarbuttons and Fluker refused his demands for mercy and instead showed absolute determination to kill him.  Tyre died later in the evening. His body lies buried in the old section of the cemetery at Bethlehem Baptist Church.

Herschel Tarbutton was carried to the sanitarium of Dr. Rawlings in Sandersville, where he died the next day.  Tarbutton also told his doctors and interrogators that he was the first to be shot.  In the midst of the excitement following the incident, many Laurens Countians believed that Tarbutton had not actually died.  Rumor had it that a dummy was inserted into his coffin and that Tarbutton was secreted to a hiding place.  To contradict the rampant rumors, Sandersville police chief L.J. Blount issued a sworn statement in the presence of Laurens County Judge of the Court of Ordinary W.A. Wood declaring that he had observed Tarbutton's death, helped to dress his body and watched as it was buried in the Sandersville cemetery.  Other reputable Sandersville citizens came forward to sustain Blount's statement, including two physicians, the chief nurse of the hospital, both the Baptist and Methodist ministers, the clerk of court and the postmaster.

News of the affair spread rapidly throughout the home counties of the participants. Laurens County Sheriff John D. Prince rode over to Sandersville to arrest Gus Tarbutton and Joe Fluker.  The two surrendered and were taken back to Laurens County to stand trial.

With the aid of C.G. Rawlings, Tarbutton and Fluker assembled perhaps the greatest league of defense attorneys ever to appear in a Laurens County courtroom.  His leading attorneys were A.F. Daley and J.L. Kent of Wrightsville, both of whom would become judges of the Dublin Judicial Circuit.  G.H. Howard and J.E. Hyman of Sandersville were also brought in on the case.  T.L. Griner and J.S. Adams of Dublin joined the defense team to handle matters in the courts in Dublin.  The heaviest hitter of all was Thomas W. Hardwick.  Hardwick was serving in the United States Congress and was one of Georgia's most popular young politicians.  Hardwick later went on to become a United States Senator and Governor of Georgia.  He lived for a few short years in Dublin, where he owned and edited the Dublin Courier Herald.   Representing the State of Georgia was a smaller, but equally impressive lineup of barristers.  Led by solicitor-general Joseph Pottle, the prosecution team was led by Thomas E. Watson, former Populist congressman and future Democratic Senator from Georgia, along with Peyton Wade, future Chief Justice of the Georgia Court of Appeals and J.B. Hicks of Dublin.  The chief assistant defense counsel in the early stages of the court proceedings was Kenrick J. Hawkins, of Dublin.  Seven years later Hawkins became the first judge of the Dublin Judicial Circuit.

Tarbutton and Fluker's initial court appearance came before Dublin District Justice of the Peace, Judge John B. Wolfe.  The defense attorneys objected to the case being heard by Judge Wolfe, who was deferred to a three-justice panel composed of Nathan Gilbert (Burgamy District), P.E. Grinstead (Reedy Springs District) and John S. Drew, Jr. (Oconee District).  With an army of lawyers in place, the legal wrangling began.

Part 2 of 2

On November 26, a commitment trial was held in the Laurens County Courthouse. Dr. W.R. Brigham took the stand first and testified that the fatal shot was fired from an elevated position.  The justices found there was sufficient evidence to bind Messers Tarbutton and Fluker over for a trial on murder charges.  T.L. Griner attempted to discredit Lee Woodum's testimony concerning the Tarbutton's instigation of the violence by showing that B.B. Linder, the deceased brother-in-law, gave Woodum a script to testify from.  The attorneys clashed in a bitter battle over the issue of whether or not Tyre's field hand's testimony had been rehearsed or even paid for.

From the very beginning, defense attorneys attempted to show that the venue of the trial should not be in Laurens County, but in Johnson County where the crime actually happened.  W.D. Howell testified that he had lived in the Kittrell community for forty years and Tyre was indeed shot in Laurens County.    J.B. Tyre took the stand next and testified that his brother told him that the defendants had killed him.  Defense attorney Griner was able to get Tyre to admit that Dr. Brigham was not present and that he was alone at the time of his accusation.  He concluded his testimony by relating what his brother told him about the events of that fateful afternoon.  He told the justices that his brother told his antagonists that they could settle the matter without trouble.   Tyre, under an intense cross-examination, finally admitted that his brother never told him that Gus or Joe shot him. C.S. Pope's testimony of a conspiracy was ruled inadmissable.

After the prosecution rested, Gus Tarbutton took the stand in his own defense. He testified that as he and Herschel  rode up, Tyre, with his shotgun in his hand, declared, "Who do you want to see?"  Gus told the justices that Tyre fired at him, striking his horse.  He went on to say that Tyre then fired six or seven shots at his brother Herschel, eventually striking him.  He said that Herschel moved back behind them and the gut shot Tyre asked him for a drink of water.  Gus said that he told Tyre if he would put down his gun that he would get him something to drink.  He then said that his uncle Joe told him that "your brother is shot all to pieces."  Joe Fluker repeated, almost exactly, the testimony of his nephew Gus.  After the Tarbutton's left the scene, Fluker told the court that he went back and retrieved Herschel's bloodstained hat, which he described as having twenty shot holes in it.

J.J. Lord rebutted Tarbutton and Fluker's testimony by stating that he heard two or three pistol shots and then the report of a shotgun, followed by ten to twelve more pistol shots from his position about a half mile away.  He continued to state that he rode to the site of the shooting on Sunday morning and found multiple bullets all over the place and only two empty shot gun shells.  On cross examination Lord admitted he found only one empty pistol shell and the two shot gun shells he found were loaded.  Lord's brother, H.H. Lord, repeated his testimony.  James Brown told the justices that he was a mile away and heard two pistol shots, then a shot gun blast and then seven or eight more shots.

Believing that the justices would grant them bail, they never introduced any evidence on their part.  The justices denied a bond for bail.  On the following Monday, Judge Lewis granted a bond of twenty thousand dollars, which was immediately posted by a group of their friends with a combined net worth of more than a million dollars.  The freed men took the first train out of town to Wrightsville.

A trial was set for February 4, 1907.  Defense attorneys moved for a continuance on multiple grounds.  It was asserted that E.P. Woods could testify that it was only Herschel Tarbutton who fired the fatal shot. The defense lawyers maintained they could not locate a crucial prosecution witness, Lee Woodum.  The state's attorneys maintained that he was available and had been in the presence of the parties just days before the trial.  With such a large number of attorneys involved in the case, their entire presence was almost impossible.   Congressman T.W. Hardwick was in attendance of a session of Congress. A.F. Daley maintained he had a severe cold and could not last a day, much less the length of an entire trial.  The court granted the delay based on the continuance more on the fact that there was a reasonable ground to allow the defense to move forward with its contention that the killing actually occurred in Johnson County.

Governor Joseph M. Terrell appointed L.W. Roberts, an Atlanta Civil Engineer, who was hired to determine the true location of the line dividing Laurens and Johnson counties.  With very scant evidence at hand, Roberts, considered one of the best surveyors in Georgia, set out to mark the line which had been established by the Georgia legislature in 1857, some fifty years earlier.  The act creating Johnson County provided that the county line would begin on the eastern bank of the Oconee River, opposite the mouth of Big Sandy Creek and then in an easterly direction to the ford at Fort's Creek on the Buckeye Road. From that point the line was to turn in a southeasterly direction to a point a mile south of Snell's Bridge on the Little Ohoopee River.  The initial map of Johnson County was of no value.  The official map of Laurens County was not much better.    Roberts did manage to locate seventy-year-old J.F. Mixon of Johnson County, who was one of the men who carried the surveyor's chains back in 1857.  Mixon accompanied him to the area and pointed out the old lines.

In mid July, Georgia Secretary of State Phil Cook upheld Robert's report.  Roberts calculated that the line in the Kittrell community was a little further south than where it was thought to have been and consequently, Tyre was shot in Johnson, and not Laurens County.  But more changes were found.  When all was said and done, Johnson County gained eight hundred acres and lost three hundred acres and ten families to Laurens County for a net gain of five hundred acres.    Laurens County hired attorney M.H. Blackshear to  protest the surveyor's findings, but to no avail.    Ironically, questions over the true location of the county line continued for at least six more decades.

The case was removed to Johnson County for trial. But with a more sympathetic Solicitor General, no trial of Gus Tarbutton or Joe Fluker ever took place.  Nearly two decades later, an interesting postscript took place in Johnson County.   On February 17, 1925, Gus Tarbutton was walking through the woods along the Oconee River, not too far from the location where he, his brother and his uncle had confronted Letcher Tyre.  In his company was one J.J. Tanner, the overseer of Mr. C.G. Rawlings.   Tarbutton and Rawlings were business partners in a mineral rights venture in the area. Each took out life insurance policies on their partner's lives.  Based primarily on the testimony of my great-great uncle Noah Covington, Jr., Tanner was convicted of killing Tarbutton.  His conviction was upheld and Tanner was sentenced to life in prison.  In a sense, Letcher Tyre reached out of his grave and got the revenge his brother so desperately sought.  This time a man had to die over money, albeit the massive sum of two hundred thousand dollars.   The Apostle Paul was right, "the love of money is the root of all evil."

FUGITIVES FROM A GEORGIA CHAINGANG

The Wyatts Return to Justice

If you were a convict in the first half of the Twentieth Century, you would not want to be sentenced to hard labor in a chain gang.  They were designed that way.  The sometimes atrocious, often brutal and to many deserved punishment tactics were intended as a deterrent to men behaving badly.   But when passion and greed swell in the minds of men, thoughts of punishment for their acts is all but forgotten.  This is the story of two men, convicted of a heinous crime in lower Laurens County, who were  sent to a chain gang, only to escape, and as they began to grow old, surrendered themselves to face the punishment they so richly deserved.

It was around the end of June 1918, when Frank Wyatt, Mitch Wyatt and Jim Fulford, with killing on their minds, set out to find their victim .  The three Wheeler County men, forcefully enlisted the aid of three Negro accomplices as they sought out one Howard  Snell, a man of limited mental ability,  had just moved to Wheeler County and lived below Glenwood.  From time to time, he did some work for the twenty-four year old Fulford.   The Wyatts and Fulford drove their car to Snell’s house, where they duped him out of his house and then forcibly kidnaped him.  The culprits drove under the cover of darkness to the sparsely populated lower edge of Laurens County before performing their despicable deed.

The assailants drove off the main road and made their way to a small swamp near Ed Evans’ store.  Snell’s hands were bound, probably by the unwilling members of the party.  Snell, knowing that his mortal fate was eminent, begged for permission to pray.  As he knelt down, Snell placed his head on a fallen log and committed his soul to his Savior.  Suddenly, the base of his skull was smashed and Snell rolled over.  Not satisfied with such a vicious blow, another of the assailants placed a gun to the dead, or dying, man’s head and pulled the trigger sending the bullet clean through the victim’s skull.  The corpse was dragged into a creek and left to the scavengers of the swamp.

Several days later a trusty convict working with a road crew found the grossly decomposed remains.   Investigators could not determine the identity of the victim, but were able to find a lodge card on his body.  They traced the card to a fraternal lodge in Waycross.  Lodge officials told the lawmen that Snell had recently moved to Glenwood.  Snell’s wife was contacted and confirmed that her husband had been missing for some time.  Eventually one of the accomplices was arrested.   Upon an intense interrogation, the man revealed that it was Frank and Mitch Wyatt along with Fulford who were the main participants in the murder.

Laurens County coroner J.C. Donaldson held an inquest to the determine the circumstances of death of Howard Snell.    The jury found that Snell had met death at the hands of Frank Wyatt, Mitch Wyatt and Jim Fulford.  The trio was brought before Judge Jule B. Greene for a commitment trial.  Judge Greene bound them over for trial along with two of their Negro accessories George Royal and George Wyatt.    When a turmoil began to arise a week before the trial, the men were taken to the jail in Macon for safekeeping.  

A the trial on August 31, 1918, the Negroes confessed and became the state’s prime witnesses against the three white defendants.   In what was described as “one of the most sensational cases in Laurens County history,” the defendants were convicted by the all white male jury.  Their life in prison convictions were upheld by the Supreme Court without a formal opinion on their attorney’s  enumerations of error on the part of the trial court.  The Wyatts and Fulford were sent back to their home county and placed in the hands of the Wheeler County convict camp.

Nearly two years after the murder on June 17, 1920, the convicted felons managed to procure some files and filed off their chains.  Once they were free to move about normally, they stole the convict boss’s clothes, grabbed some rifles and ammunition and vanished into the night.    A large posse was formed, but no trace of the fugitives was ever found, that is until seventeen years later.

Jim Fulford, aka Jim Tompkins,  met his mortal fate in 1923, when he was killed, allegedly by Frank Wyatt, aka Frank Jackson,  in Louisiana. After three bitterly contested trials, Wyatt was found not guilty of killing one of his coconspirators.   Prosecutors in Louisiana had no knowledge that Wyatt and the victim were fugitives from Georgia. Wyatt was released to resume a normal life as a carpenter.  

By 1937 Frank Wyatt was seventy three years old.   With his conscience tormenting his mind, the elder Wyatt surrendered to the Monroe sheriff.  The younger Wyatt, resisting a voluntary confession, had to be forcibly arrested.  Eventually both men expressed their willingness to return to Georgia to prove their innocence.  The men maintained they were framed by “a Negro moonshiner and a white man” for the crime and that it was actually Fulford who did the killing. 

Laurens County sheriff I.F. Coleman was in his office when a long distance phone call came in on July 18, 1937.  It was the sheriff in Monroe, Louisiana telling the startled lawman that he had two of his  fugitives in his jail.  Sheriff Coleman contacted the governor’s office to initiate extradition proceedings.  The Wyatts assented to the request and hired an attorney to prove their innocence.   

But too much time had elapsed and the fugitives were never able to prove their innocence.  The duo spent the rest of their lives in the penal system, paying the price for their crimes.

AND TEARS ARE HEARD WITHIN THE HARP I TOUCH

The Murder of James Sheffield

IRWINTON: April 28, 1888: Mr. James Arthur  Sheffield was taking a pleasant stroll down the street near Irwinton's Academy on a warm, fair  Saturday night one hundred and twenty five years ago.  A waning gibbous moon was just coming up in the East casting a pale white glow on  just another peaceful spring  night in the capital of Wilkinson County.  

At the appointed closing time of 8:00 p.m.,  Sheffield, accompanied by Messers Rutland,  shut and locked tight his store doors and set out for home.  The men parted at the fork in the road,  just as they usually did.

  

Shortly thereafter, the 46-year-old Sheffield left the town's business district. As he was within hailing distance of his home, where his wife Winnie and daughter Minnie were near their front door awaiting his arrival, a shot gun blast rang out in the near darkness. The Rutlands saw the bright flash and heard the loud report of gunfire.  Not hearing any fatal screams, the Rutlands thought not too much of the commotion and went on to their homes in preparation for the upcoming Sabbath. 

The murderer rifled through Sheffield's pockets, grabbed his loot and dashed off into the darkness, crossing the split rail fence at the school house yard and leaving blood stains to mark his incriminating trail.

The murderer rapidly ran across the abandoned campus for nearly 150 yards before stopping to rip open Sheffield's satchel to look for folding money and silver coins - Sheffield's usual cargo on his evening  strolls home.  The gunman sprinted across a pasture to the northwestern corner of town.  Across a freshly plowed oat field, the distinctive footprints  of the killer marked his westward escape route.    

Just as the town's clocks were striking nine o'clock, an older black man and a young white boy came upon Sheffield's bloody, lifeless body.  At first, the pedestrians thought that the man lying in the road was simply intoxicated from an excessive bit of Saturday night revelry. Upon further examination, a fatal, massive wound was found in the back of Sheffield's head.  The boy quickly raced to the nearest home to report the matter.

It was said that early on Sunday morning every male inhabitant of Irwinton joined a posse formed by Sheriff I. J. Fountain.  That may or not be true, but it reasonable to believe that the justice seeking squad was quite large and doggedly determined to find their man, whoever he was.

The posse moved out from the resting place of the abandoned satchel, cut open by a somewhat dull knife, with their eyes focused on the ground and looking for any sign of footprints and blood drops. Sheriff Fountain's deputies followed the trail up to the home of one Martha Collins.  Inquiring of the whereabouts of her son Will Collins, Mrs. Collins, a colored woman not suspected of any complicity  in the matter,  responded that her son had gone up to the home of Shade Coates. 

The posse followed that same trail three quarters of a mile up to Coates home, where they found the barefooted, capitulant twenty-year-old Will Collins. When the lawmen burst into the room, they found Collins sitting on a bed playing his harp as if he had not a care in the world. 

Sheriff Fountain questioned Collins as to his whereabouts at the time of his murder. Collins responded that he had gone to bed early, but after being awakened, he went to the home of Coates.

A search of the Collins' pockets revealed just more than twenty one dollars in cash, over half of it in "V" nickels and silver Liberty dimes - an agglomeration that a retail merchant would be carrying home with him after closing his store.

The investigators found a double barreled shot gun, one of its barrels having been recently fired.  Inside the other unfired barrel were tiny scraps of  newspaper wadding - in particular, fragments from the February 8, 1888 edition of the Wrightsville Headlight.  Bits and pieces of the same issue  were found at the murder scene.   It was surmised that the blood got on Collins' gun when the killer reached inside the clothing and the bag of the victim to retrieve the missing money. A small blood stain was also  found on the Collins' vest. The blood evidence was sent to Dr. Clifton, a renowned microscopist, for analysis.  

Collins explained how he came upon such an unusually large sum of money, at least for him,  by stating that an unknown man approached him and offered to pay him $20.00 for the use of his gun and his shoes for an hour.   His account changed when he claimed that he borrowed $25.00 from his uncle to help him out of a financial "scrape."   That claim was discounted by the uncle, who told law enforcement officers that he could barely put together $2.00 to lend. More seemingly ad-libbed and totally contrary  accounts followed. 

Highly damning evidence came from eyewitnesses who saw Collins in town during the hours following the murder.  Shade Coates, a shoe maker in Sheffield's store, was initially arrested as an accomplice because of his ability to provide the killer (his friend Collins) with inside information and the testimony of witnesses who saw Coates at the Collins home the night of the murder.  

Will Collins was taken to a Macon jail for his own safety.  While there, witnesses said that he was always at ease, describing the prisoner as "the gayest of the gay."  Not a bit of trouble was brought the way of his captors, who stated that he played sports with his fellow prisoners without a single indication of the villainous crime he was charged with. 

A trial was held in the first week of October 1888.  With no direct evidence to prove Collins' guilt, prosecutors put together a solid, logically connected case of circumstantial evidence sufficient to establish the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

After listening to all of the evidence, the jury carefully deliberated and pronounced a verdict of guilty with a recommendation of life in prison, a sentence which began with hard labor in the coal mines of Dade County, Georgia. When Collins, who was constantly complaining of chest pains,  left his prison cell, he was described as "a living skeleton." 

   

To the unanimous jurors, their decision was solely based on a series of circumstances.  Many of them firmly believed that new evidence would surface to implicate the true killer.  But in the end, none of the twelve  white men wanted to allow Collins to get off scot free and to strike his harp and ignore the trickling tears of little Minnie.

D.C. BLACK

The Great Escapee



D.C. Black couldn’t stay in one place for very long, especially behind the iron bars of a cramped, dank and dark jail cell. So from the very first moment he was captured by Laurens County authorities, D.C. Black began to plot his escape from the Laurens County jail. Sure enough, just as he had done many times before, this fleeing felon escaped his captors in short order. This time, his freedom was ephemeral when he was recaptured by two state patrolmen and a Georgia National Guard colonel.

D.C. Black, already known as an “elusive escapee,” participated in a mass unauthorized exodus of at least twenty-eight others from the state prison near Reidsville on April 16, 1943. Black joined his compatriot and fellow escape artist, Leland Harvey, on a crime rampage. Within ten days, all but four of the escaped prisoners had been recaptured. Black and Harvey, two of the most illustrious felons anywhere in Georgia, were captured in Arkwright, near Macon, on April 25. Both men were asleep in their car and did not resist their arrest.

Just two days later, Black, who was serving one to twenty years on robbery charges, was on the lamb again. Harvey and Black, dressed in civilian clothes, easily overwhelmed a Bibb County deputy, calmly took the elevator down from the fifth story jail in the courthouse, quietly stole a car, and westwardly raced at speeds of more than 85 mph toward Vineville. Black and Harvey’s easy escape was blamed on woefully ineffective and possibly corrupt Bibb County deputies.

On May 12, the skipping scoundrel was encountered by a pair of Atlanta detectives who sprayed his path with warning rounds toward the back of the barn where he was hiding just outside of Morrow, Georgia. Not chancing another escape from a less than secure county jail, Black was returned to the state penitentiary in Reidsville for a long tenure on the chain gang.

Black was serving a 41 to 45-year sentence in a Ware prison, when he staged yet another in a long string of escapes. Black attempted to rob a hotel in Macon on Thursday, May 10, 1956. Within a few hours, he was spotted by six alert Dublinites, who recognized the tag number while they were returning from work at Warner Robins Air Force Base. One of the men called the State Patrol. Meanwhile the others tailed the suspect until patrolmen arrested him, but not before Black attempted to wreck their cars. A shootout took place behind the Shamrock Court Motel, which was situated across Highway 80 from the Dublin VA Center.

After an intense interrogation, Black finally admitted that his name was not A.J. Allen and that he was wanted on outstanding robbery charges. Almost proud of his crimes, the running rascal admitted that he stole a few items on his flight from Macon.

Just about eight o’clock on Saturday morning, county jailer Art Sapp went into the cell area and opened the door. Suddenly, the strongly built Black grabbed Sapp and wrested his gun away and forced the jailer into the cell. Black ran behind the Speed Oil Company and then across East Jackson Street. After stealing Carl Allen’s 1954 Chevrolet with a quarter of tank of gas in it, Black headed west along Highway 80 before turning southeast through a maze of dirt roads. The car took the skipping scoundrel as far as a wooded area northeast of Rentz, where it was reported found by Highway Patrol Sergeant, B.A. Snipes. Then the departing dastard set out on foot.

Sheriff Carlus Gay issued an order for a countywide man hunt by sheriff’s deputies, Dublin and East Dublin police, State Patrol officers, and GBI agents, which totaled more than one hundred men. Governor Marvin Griffin called in the National Guard for help.

While running through the woods, the vanishing villain got a whiff of Mrs. Millard Coleman’s cooking. After identifying himself as a wanted man, Black demanded that Mrs. Coleman cook him a meal and fix himself some sandwiches in exchange for not hurting her. After Black skedaddled, Mrs. Coleman called family friend and attorney Bill White, who alerted Sheriff Gay.

By the late hours of Monday evening, a pack of bloodhounds and their handlers arrived from Milledgeville to join in the chase. The hunt continued until Tuesday morning when Black was spotted by National Guardsmen Donald Maddox, Pete Wicker, H.T. Lindsey, and Bobby Ennis.

Just before dawn on Tuesday the exhausted escapee, bruised and scraped, fell to the ground. He begged his captors, Corporal W.B. Garr, Trooper J.T. Cauthen, and Col. W.B. Crowley, not to shoot him, indicating that Jailer Sapp’s gun was in his hip pocket of the overalls he had stolen earlier in the day some two and one half miles from the Coleman home. Although his skin was scratched and his clothes torn by briars and brambles, Black was closely shaven, his stolen razor still in his pocket.

Black, always the deserting degenerate, was shackled and brought back to the county jail on the southeast corner of the courthouse square. To make sure Black’s stay was a longer and uneventful one, Sheriff Gay placed the frequent fugitive in the “death cell.”

Black commented on his failed escape by stating that the next time he escaped, he would get a taxi and get a hotel room. He told reporters that the officers were so close to him several times that he could hear transmissions over their walkie-talkies. When asked by a Courier Herald reporter how it felt to be hunted for three days, Black responded, “It is about like a rabbit being hunted.”

To make things worse for the Sheriff’s deputies while the search for Black was intensifying, nine prisoners escaped from the Public Works Camp on Sunday night and set out on a mass string of robberies and thefts. With little sleep after an all night manhunt, deputies answered a call about a cracker salesman who was robbed in Orianna by persons fitting the description of the escaped prisoners.

Warden Coleman said the nine men simply vanished without a trace. The escapees scattered in all directions and stole cars, one belonging to Dr. Nelson Carswell and another to O.L. Colter. Within four days, more than half of the men were recaptured at various points around the state.

Additional charges of attempted robbery, automobile theft, escape, and breaking and entering were issued against Black. It wouldn’t be the last time Black, alias Allen John Billingsley, would escape. He ran his total escapes to seventeen, including possibly his last one in 1975 , when and his old escaping ally, Leland Harvey, both near the age of seventy, walked out of a correctional facility up the road in Hardwick, Georgia, one designed for aged and infirmed criminals. The duo was caught in Mississippi when Black’s stolen Cadillac sideswiped a bridge railing and crashed. But it was here, a mile east of Rentz, Georgia that D.C. Black, the disappearing desperado, saw the end to one of his last great escapes.

P.S. I wasn't able to find a picture of D.C. Black.  Apparently, he never stood still long enough to have one made.