Anatomy of Injustice Read online

  THE TOWN

  GREENWOOD, NAMED IN the early 1800s after a plantation that the owner’s wife had called Green Wood, has rich chocolate soil, fertile for small-scale agriculture. But it had grown as a textile town—Greenwood Cotton Mill opened in 1889, a second mill in 1896, and a third in 1897. At its peak, there were 250,000 spindles in the Greenwood environs. In 1897, the town’s voters—all white males, of course—approved a $25,000 bond issue for a courthouse and jail. By the turn of the century, the population had soared to 4,828 and nine railroad lines passed through the municipality, bringing twenty-seven trains each day. Traveling salesmen stayed at the Oregon Hotel, the only hotel in town until the 1960s.

  Though perhaps today “an hour and a half from everyplace else” (as President Obama would describe it good-naturedly during his presidential campaign), Greenwood residents have much to boast about in their history. After World War I, they saluted Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch with a huge celebration on Main Street, slightly wider than the length of a football field at the time—before office buildings went up. In 1954, the street was packed with cheering residents turned out to welcome a local girl who had been crowned Miss Universe, Miriam Stevenson. The small town has produced the Swingin’ Medallions, modeled on the Beach Boys; a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court; and three star quarterbacks in succession for Clemson University. Greenwood residents are crazy about their sports. The high school football coach Julius “Pinky” Babb became a legend, winning more than three hundred games between 1943 and 1981. “We were confident in our excellence,” said a resident.

  It was a white, Protestant community, primarily Southern Baptist. It had very few Catholics until the 1960s, when some northern companies began to relocate in the Emerald City, as the town calls itself. As for blacks, fifteen years after the Supreme Court had declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that separate schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional, and a year later ordered integration “with all deliberate speed,” Greenwood’s high schools were still segregated. The segregationists held out until 1969, and then they gave in grudgingly. Greenwood doesn’t hide its racial past. A war memorial sits at the corner of Oak and Main, in front of the redbrick, seven-story Textile Building. American Legion Post No. 20 erected it in 1929. A pole carrying the Stars and Stripes extends from a six-foot-high granite base. The bronze plaque on the west side of the base lists the World War I dead in two categories—“White” and “Colored.” Thirty-one “whites” and 24 “coloreds” gave their lives. The “colored” include Henry Chin. Another plaque was added after World War II. It also racially divides the men who were killed in action: 131 “white” and 11 “colored.” The racial categories were eliminated for the Korean War—12 men from Greenwood are remembered in alphabetical order. Twenty-four men died in the Vietnam War; their names are also listed alphabetically.

  At the beginning of the twenty-first century, C. Rauch Wise, a lawyer and probably Greenwood’s only card-carrying member of the ACLU, offered to replace the segregationist plaques from the first two wars with plaques that listed the dead alphabetically. He quietly took the proposal to the mayor. After some inquiries, the mayor, an African American, reported back that it couldn’t be done. The monument didn’t belong to the city, he said. It belonged to the local American Legion post, which opposed the change. A few years later, in 2010, Wise tried again. Again, the legionnaires said no.

  Over the decades Greenwood grew out, not up. The eight-story Grier Building, at 327 Main Street, was the tallest in town when it was built in 1919 and is the tallest today. Greenwood’s charm gave way to sprawl, and the town became indistinguishable from thousands of others across the country—shopping malls with enormous parking lots, chains replacing independents, fast-food franchises. A small grocery store owned by Dorothy’s next-door neighbor Jimmy Holloway was bought by a supermarket chain, which later sold to a chain steak house.

  DOROTHY SPENT CHRISTMAS 1981 with her daughter, Carolyn, and her grandchildren. Carolyn had married—she was now Carolyn Lee—and was living in Pensacola, Florida. Dorothy returned home on Sunday, December 27, she noted on her calendar. On Wednesday, Edward Elmore, a lean black man with bright eyes, knocked on the back door. With only a fifth-grade education and of limited intelligence—he could do simple addition and subtraction only if he used his fingers—he worked as a handyman. A few weeks earlier, while working for one of Dorothy’s neighbors, he had noticed that the gutters on the house at 209 were full of leaves; he asked Dorothy if she would like him to clean them. Mrs. Edwards said yes. She showed him where the ladder was, underneath the porch. The job took him about two hours, for which he was paid $3. Come back in a few weeks, after the leaves have finished falling, she said.

  On December 30 he returned, cleaned out the gutters, and washed the windows as well. While Mrs. Edwards was writing him a check, Elmore told her that the paint on some of the window frames was peeling. He was a good painter, he said. She told him to call in a month or two, when the weather would be better. She slowly spelled her last name and phone number, and he scrawled “Edwards” and “229-4087” on a State Farm Insurance card, which was in his girlfriend’s name for her 1976 Mustang; he put it back in his wallet. Dorothy later told Jimmy Holloway what a fine job Elmore had done and showed him the clean windows.

  The new year was promising to be a good one for Dorothy. On the calendar square for January 3, she wrote “Lonnie’s.” Lonnie Morgan was a businessman from Tryon, North Carolina, retired, living comfortably on the proceeds from the business he had sold. He was a member of the Tryon Hunt and Riding Club; Dorothy, a keen rider, was planning to join. They had been introduced by a Converse College classmate of Dorothy’s and had been seeing each other for a couple of years; she had recently told neighbors that they were talking about getting married. She visited him in Tryon on January 3. The following Saturday, January 9, she went to a choir party at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, a couple of miles away, over on South Main. She attended regularly and was a standout soloist in the choir.

  On Thursday afternoon, the fourteenth, when a front-page headline alerted residents, “More snow, sleet heading this way,” Jimmy Holloway called around three. He and his wife, Frances, were about to go grocery shopping and offered to pick up some things for Dorothy. The Holloways were her closest friends. They had met at the Oregon Hotel on the eve of World War II, and Jimmy had encouraged Dorothy and Ed to build on the plot next to his.

  Jimmy walked over and got her shopping list; then he and his wife drove to the Winn-Dixie supermarket, out on Route 25. When they returned, Dorothy asked Jimmy if he’d lift a five-gallon kerosene canister out of the trunk of her car; she had bought it for a portable heater, which she needed now, with the unusual cold. He carried it through the kitchen and into her den. The three of them chatted for a while.

  On Saturday, Jimmy called Dorothy and again offered to go grocery shopping for her. It was sleeting, but the temperature had moved above freezing, melting the worst icy patches. She said she could go herself. She also told him that she was planning to go to North Carolina the next day to visit Lonnie. After hanging up, she drove to Winn-Dixie. In the checkout line she chatted with an old friend, Coley Free. She showed him pictures of her two grandchildren and her two-year-old great-grandson, and then she took her change from the checkout girl, put it in her purse, and drove home. It was late in the afternoon.

  THE CRIME

  FORTY-FOUR HOURS LATER, the body of Dorothy Ely Edwards was found in her bedroom closet. She was clad only in a reddish-purple housecoat with a ruffled collar, zipped up the front.

  There was a horrible bruise on her right knee, and her lower right leg was reddish purple. Her knees were drawn up. A dress boot was wedged between them. Pieces of glass were stuck in the dried blood on her left wrist. Her left ear was nearly severed. The areas around both eyes were black-and-blue. Her hair was matted with blood.

  The murder rocked the community. Most of Greenwood’s mur
ders were in the black neighborhood—blacks killing blacks in barroom brawls, over money or a woman, or in domestic disputes. The perpetrator was usually caught quickly, often with a gun or knife still in his possession. Those crimes didn’t particularly disturb the white community. This one did. “Widow Stabbed to Death” screamed the headline at the top of the front page of the Greenwood Index-Journal, accompanied by a picture of policemen at the house. (On that day’s front page there was also an article reporting that the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5–4, had overturned the death sentence of Monty Lee Eddings, who at the age of sixteen had been convicted of killing an Oklahoma highway patrolman with a sawed-off shotgun; the court said that the jury had not been properly instructed to consider mitigating evidence.)

  THE POLICE

  “MYSELF AND PATROLMAN ALVIN COOK were on Smythe Street when we heard a radio dispatched message of a possible Code One, which is an attempted murder,” Sgt. John Owen wrote in his official report. (The dispatcher had it wrong—Code 1 is murder.) “Myself and Alvin Cook then proceded to 209 Melrose Terrace. And we arrived there at 12:26 p.m. Myself and Patrolman Cook went to the home where we found Patrolman Holtzclaw at the rear of this home.” Holtzclaw was talking to Jimmy Holloway, under the carport, next to Edwards’s 1976 Cadillac; her large-wheeled bicycle, with handlebars like a gnu’s horns, rested against the back door.

  Owen noticed what appeared to be an impression of a shoe print to the left of the steps leading into the house. It was reddish. “I believe to be blood,” he wrote. He took Holtzclaw’s navy blue police hat, with a stiff bill and the Greenwood Police Department seal, and placed it over the print. He walked to his patrol car, opened the trunk, took out a cardboard box, walked back, and placed the box over the print; then he gave Holtzclaw his hat back. “I enformed them of what I had found and advised that this print was not to be disturbed,” Owen wrote.

  By 12:30 that afternoon, most of Greenwood’s forty-five-man police force had descended on the usually tranquil Melrose Terrace, blocking the street with their patrol cars, stirring curiosity and concern among the residents. Sgt. Alvin Johnson, six foot two, two hundred pounds, took charge. He was thirty-two years old and had been on the force for close to eleven years, since being discharged from the Marine Corps with a Purple Heart. Not the smartest kid at Greenwood High, Johnson had joined the marines immediately upon graduation and was still only eighteen years old when he arrived in Vietnam. During a fierce firefight south of Da Nang, his body was shredded by shrapnel and he nearly died, saved only by an alert squad member who hollered for a corpsman.

  “What I done when I first got there is talk to Mr. Holloway,” Johnson would later testify.

  After Mr. Edwards died, Holloway had watched over his widow. He had a key to her house. He liked to slip over in the afternoon for a cocktail. His wife was a straitlaced teetotaler. Dorothy drank, socially. “A southern belle who liked a glass of sherry,” said her daughter. Melrose Terrace residents thought there was more to the relationship between Holloway and Dorothy than just being good neighbors. Popular and gregarious, Holloway had a reputation as something of a ladies’ man. Neighbors would whisper among themselves about how he would come out of his house, go into his garage, and then look out to see if anyone was watching. Then he’d walk around to the back of his house, stop, look again, and then head across the lawn and over the creek into Dorothy’s yard. At that point, the neighbors couldn’t see him anymore. But an hour or so later, they’d see him retracing his route. Dorothy spent many days at Holloway’s cabin on Lake Greenwood, a reservoir with 212 miles of shoreline on the Saluda River. Dorothy painted while Jimmy worked on his boats.

  Holloway told the police officers that he had found Mrs. Edwards’s body. It was he who had called the police. He now led Johnson and Owen inside his neighbor’s house, retracing the steps he had already taken at least twice that morning. In the small alcove by the back door, the policemen glanced at several of Dorothy’s oils: one of Holloway’s Lake Greenwood cabin; three of sailboats on the lake, painted from his veranda; a still life of fruit. On the basement door, Dorothy had mounted a metal rack holding three clay flowerpots; it had been knocked askew, pieces of the lower pot on the floor. The three men walked into the kitchen, covered with wallpaper showing green ivy crawling up white bricks. Three wingback metal chairs with floral cushions were carefully arranged around a small circular table; a spoon and a glass mug lay on top. On the floor, Johnson saw a partial denture. A few feet away was a needle-nose pliers. Sticking out of a drawer where Mrs. Edwards kept a Stanley hammer, a screwdriver, nails, a ruler, and masking tape were long-handled bottle tongs, which she used for pulling canning jars out of hot water. A coffee cup had been washed and left to dry upside down on the edge of the sink. On the countertop was a bowl of bananas, oranges, and apples and an empty bottle of Taylor sherry.

  There was something odd about this scene. The bottle tongs all but had a sign on them saying “Here, find me.” And the kitchen was remarkably clean and neat after such a violent crime. It felt as if someone had been entertaining—witness the empty sherry bottle—and then cleaned up. There was fingerprint dust on the sherry bottle, which meant that the police probably had a clue as to who had been in the house if the print wasn’t Mrs. Edwards’s.

  Dorothy’s ten-cup General Electric automatic coffeemaker was on a green Formica cabinet. Another Dorothy oil, a ballerina in a pink tutu—it was Carolyn—hung above it. “I have one just like it,” Holloway said to Johnson, referring to the coffeemaker. It was set for 6:00 a.m. Holloway explained that Dorothy would have had to set it after 7:00 p.m. the previous night. The coffee had burned dry in the Pyrex pot; Johnson turned it off.

  Johnson, Owen, and Holloway passed through the swinging door into the dining room. They noticed a bloody shoe print on the blue carpet at the far end of the dining room, “pointed outward as if someone were walking away from the bedroom area and into the dining room,” Owen reported. They turned right, into the den. There was a piano, a grandfather clock, several easy chairs, and a table. On top of a console television set was an elephant carved from expensive black stone with real ivory tusks (which Dorothy had inherited from her mother). In front of the television was an antique settee, covered in silk; a white blanket, which Mrs. Edwards had crocheted, lay on it, rumpled. Her eyeglasses were lying on the coffee table in front of the couch, next to a TV Guide, which was open to Saturday night for the shows between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m.: Joyful News, a religious show on Channel 16; Classic Country Music on 17 and 33; Resurrection on HBO; a college basketball game between DePaul and Old Dominion on ESPN. The television was blaring; Johnson turned it off.

  Moving back into the foyer, the police and Holloway paused at a drop-leaf table on which Dorothy had placed a silver tray with a decanter and four crystal goblets, several ashtrays, a bowl with artificial fruit, a pair of lined gloves, and a checkbook. This was where Mrs. Edwards put her Aigner clutch purse, Holloway told Johnson. It wasn’t there now. They continued to the bedrooms, at the back of the house. On the right was the guest bedroom, with a late-eighteenth-century canopied bed and a small dressing table on which were two porcelain figures, a man and woman in Early American dress, and two family photos in gold-colored frames. Nothing was amiss there.

  Dorothy’s bedroom was the next room. Her alarm clock, set for 7:00 a.m., was still ringing. Johnson shut it off. The carpet was strewn with a roll of Clorets mints, a penny, some Kleenex, a small leatherette key holder, an AA battery, envelopes, and a “Save 10 Cents” coupon. There was a heavy glass ashtray with an ornate gold rim from which a big piece had been chipped off. Johnson noticed a partial denture, the other portion of what he had seen in the kitchen.

  On top of Dorothy’s chest of drawers were several sweaters, all neatly folded; a bra; and several family photos in silver frames—one of Dorothy’s husband when he was in the navy, one of the two of them, another of Carolyn, and one of her grandchildren. A serrated cake spatula jarred this picture of domesti
c tranquillity. The handle had dried blood on it; a lipstick-smudged tissue partially covered it. How was it possible that the bloody spatula had ended up there without disturbing anything else?

  Dorothy Edwards had slept in a canopied 1800s bed of her own, with four solid posts. There was a night table on each side. From the indentations in the carpet, Johnson determined that the right side of the bed, as he stood at its foot, had been jarred from its normal position against the wall by about six inches. The bed looked recently made, Johnson wrote in his report.

  The white carpet near the closet door was saturated with blood. There was more on the wall outside the closet. Johnson opened the closet, and there was Dorothy’s bloodied body, just as Holloway had said he’d found it. Her head was almost past the left edge of the door frame, just touching a white chest of drawers in the closet that was streaked with blood.

  Johnson quickly walked back through the house and secured the scene. “Cornor Duvall arrived at 12:36,” Johnson noted in his report on the investigation, referring to the county coroner, Odell Duvall. Johnson’s superior, Capt. Jim Coursey, arrived two minutes later. Like Johnson, Coursey had enlisted upon graduating from Greenwood High, opting for the navy. He was honorably discharged after three years as a parachute rigger third class. Some residents remembered that in high school Coursey had been a hell-raiser and had had his own scrapes with the law. Maybe that made him a better cop, some thought—he understood that every high school boy who drank too much or drove too fast didn’t need to be saddled with a criminal record. He also had a reputation for being a redneck, though that did not set him apart at the time.