A Death in Belmont - Sebastian Junger

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running at the sight of a policeman whether he’d done anything wrong or not. There were times when Lerone had to sleep under other peoples’ houses to avoid being arrested. When Lerone was older he got a shack out in the country where he bootlegged, raised hogs, worked on old tractors, and had parties. The place was a half hour drive down a dirt road from the nearest highway, and people would show up at all hours to drink, gamble, and carry on in ways that they couldn’t in town.

      It was with Lerone, of course, that Roy had his first very serious encounter with Sheriff Boyce Bratton.

      THE LAFAYETTE COUNTY Courthouse dominates Oxford from the center of the town square. It is a whitewashed two-story building with high arched windows and four fluted columns on a second-floor veranda that looks out over huge, graceful water oaks. A four-faced clock on the roof peak theoretically gave the time to every person in town, though it was often broken. A granite statue of a Confederate soldier on the south side of the building commemorates the young men who “gave their lives in a just and holy cause.” It is worth noting that one out of three men in Mississippi’s armed forces died for that cause, and that one-fifth of the state budget went to fitting the survivors with artificial limbs. In Oxford war fever ran so high that virtually the entire student body of the University of Mississippi enlisted en masse, closing the school. Their regiment, called the University Grays, suffered a 100 percent casualty rate during the infamous Pickett’s charge at the battle of Gettysburg; every single man in the regiment was either killed, wounded, or captured before they reached the top of Seminary Ridge. Inside the double oak doors of the courthouse, through the clerk’s office on the right, in a small windowless room in the back, rows of leatherbound docket books lean haphazardly on shelves.

      The books are two feet high and broken down at the spine and embossed with gold lettering. In the volume that includes 1949, on page 312, under the date March 17, Roy Smith’s name is entered with the charge of burglary and a bail of one thousand dollars. It had been hardly a month since Roy’s last encounter with the law, and this time he was with Lerone and his half brother, Tommy Hudson. Tommy and Lerone supposedly didn’t get along very well, but they got along well enough to get arrested together.

      Lerone and Tommy were arrested first, and Roy was picked up the following day. They were arrested by Sheriff Bratton, who may have simply gone to Andy Smith’s place on South Sixteenth and told him that he wanted the boys to turn themselves in. Bratton stood only five feet eight but was so feared that he didn’t even bother to wear a gun. When he had to arrest someone, he simply showed up at their home and told them they were coming downtown; invariably they complied. The jail was a two-story brick building on the east side of the square, with a kitchen on the first floor where the jailer’s wife cooked for the inmates, and a single cell on the second floor where the inmates slept. The cell was secured by a massive door hewed from a single slab of oak that was hung on iron hinges and locked by an iron bar padlocked through two iron hasps. It still had bullet holes in it from an earlier lynching. A single window, crudely barred, gave the inmates a view of the streets in which they had just committed their crimes. “The dark limber hands would lie in the grimed interstices,” William Faulkner wrote in 1948 about the Oxford jailhouse window, “while the mellow untroubled repentless voices would shout down to the women in the aprons of cooks or nurses and the girls in their flash cheap clothes from the mail order houses or the other young men who had not been caught yet or had been caught and freed yesterday, gathered along the street.”

      Roy and Tommy and Lerone had committed the sin of stealing cotton. Tommy owned an old Packard, and the three brothers had driven it out to a farm owned by a big planter named Guy McCarty and sent Roy into the “cotton house,” where the raw cotton was stored, to drag out four or five bags. Cotton was going for fifty or sixty cents a pound back then—the war had caused cotton prices to skyrocket—and a trunk full of cotton would have been worth hundreds of dollars. It would have been an enormous amount of money for them, even split three ways—but it also put them way over the fifty-dollar limit for grand larceny. They apparently made it off the McCarty place without getting caught but immediately ran into problems back in town. Roy’s old boss, Ross Brown, had a cotton gin behind the post office, and Lerone and Tommy drove the cotton there to try to sell it. They must have been asked where the cotton came from almost as soon as they drove onto the scales.

      “They probably tried to pass themselves off as sharecroppers,” says John Bounds, an Oxford insurance agent who knew the Smith family very well. “Sharecroppers could bring cotton in, but most of the time it would be the farmer. They would have gotten all kinds of questions. ‘Where is your land?’ ‘Which place do you share on?’ If you don’t have a cotton allotment from the government you can’t sell cotton, you can’t grow cotton. And the buyer would know every farmer in the county. It wouldn’t have taken long for them to ask someone whether Tommy and Lerone were sharecropping for them that year.”

      Andy raised the thousand-dollar bond to get Roy released, and Roy made an appointment with JWT Falkner to represent him in court. The office was above a barbershop on the town square and was rigged with a water hose to disperse loiterers from the front steps. When Roy walked in he would have found himself standing in front of a simple wood desk with tooled hardwood legs on iron casters. JWT faced him across the desk in a straight-backed slatted swivel chair that was also on casters. The office had old hardwood floors and dented steel filing cabinets and a stamped tin ceiling with magnesium lights and two floor-to-ceiling windows that filtered the daylight through cheap louvered blinds. Falkner probably told Roy that his not-guilty plea didn’t have a chance in hell and that the most he, Falkner, could do for him was to minimize his prison time. By prison he would have meant Parchman Farm, a notorious state-run plantation a hundred miles west in the Mississippi Delta. That service would have cost Roy about five hundred dollars, which would have been money well spent. Parchman Farm operated at a profit, in part because it was known for—quite literally—working its inmates to death.

      It took almost a year for Roy’s case to be heard by Judge Taylor McElroy. An article in the Oxford Eagle on March 23, 1950, commented that justice had been served at the circuit court that week despite the fact that not a single jury had been convened and not a single witness had been put on the stand. “Just about every defendant pled guilty without a trial,” the newspaper gloated, “and are now at Parchman serving their sentence.” Twenty-three men—ranging from James Lester, who got eighteen months for operating a whiskey still, to Eugene Chatham, who got natural life for killing his wife on the streets of Oxford—decided not to annoy Judge McElroy by insisting on a trial. Guilty pleas were common in Mississippi courts, by innocent and guilty alike, but clearing an entire slate was remarkable even by the standards of the time. “Roy Smith, colored,” the Eagle noted in the very last court entry, identifying his race, as was customary. “Burglary, six months.”

      Roy was now an inmate of the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman Farm.

       FOUR

      THE BELMONT POLICE had never investigated a murder before—their notes were typed on forms that read “Traffic Bureau Report” at the top—so three additional detectives were sent by the state police. They arrived within an hour of the discovery of Bessie Goldberg’s body and immediately began assembling evidence that Roy Smith had committed the crime. Unlike most murders involving strangers, the fact that Smith had been at the Goldbergs’ that day wasn’t enough to convict him; Smith was supposed to have been there. The very thing that made him a suspect also explained his presence adequately. The detectives needed either a plausible motive for Smith to kill, or they needed physical evidence linking him to the dead body.

      At ten-thirty that night—after the murder scene had been photographed, dusted for fingerprints, and sketched and Bessie Goldberg’s body had been removed for autopsy—a Belmont police officer named Alfred King interviewed the stricken Israel Goldberg. With King were state police lieutenant John Cahalane and Sgt. Leo McNulty. Israel Goldberg, of course, was both a witness and—theoretically, anyway—a suspect, though it must have been clear to all of the detectives that this frail sixty-eight-year-old man could not possibly have murdered his wife in the two-minute period between his entering

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