Anatomy of Injustice Read online

  Johnson filled in Coursey on what he had seen and what Holloway had told him. They went through the house together, and Coursey looked at Mrs. Edwards’s body. He knew he was going to need help. This murder would have to be solved and solved quickly to calm elderly widows and, more generally, keep the community at bay.

  Coursey went to his car and radioed the police dispatcher. He asked him to notify the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, in the capital, Columbia, about seventy miles away. SLED, as just about everyone calls it (many South Carolinians don’t even know the full name), is the local equivalent of the FBI, coming in to help with complicated crimes. Coursey secured the house; then he, Johnson, and the other Greenwood police officers sat in their cars to get out of the cold while they waited for the SLED agents.

  When the call came in at SLED headquarters, two agents from the firearms section, Dan DeFreese and Ira Byrd Parnell Jr. grabbed their 35 mm Nikons, jumped into their state sedan, and sped to Greenwood. When they reached the south edge of the city, on Route 34, Patrolman Holtzclaw was waiting to guide them to Melrose Terrace.

  There were no SLED manuals or guidelines for investigations. Parnell and DeFreese took no notes as they went through the house. DeFreese dusted for fingerprints—outside at the screen door, where the killer was thought to have entered; on the kitchen utensils and the wine bottle on the counter; in her bathroom, on the underside of the toilet seat. Parnell squeezed himself into the closet and took pictures of the body and then of the bedroom. Some of the photos showed a pool of blood on the carpet outside the closet. Strangely, there wasn’t any blood on the strip of wood under the door, that piece between the carpet in the closet and the carpet in the bedroom.

  Parnell and DeFreese pulled Mrs. Edwards out of the closet and tied a plastic bag on each of her hands to preserve any evidence under her well-manicured fingernails, such as blood, hair, or skin that she almost certainly would have scraped from her assailant during a struggle. They wedged her into a body bag, robe and all. The agents went through the house, gathering evidence. On the drop-leaf table in the hallway near the front door they found her checkbook. The register, running from September 11, 1981, to January 7, 1982, showed one check for $5, another for $8.75, one for $8, and another for $8.25, written to various payees. And there was check 4031, written on December 30 for $43, made out to Edward Elmore. Holloway told Johnson that Elmore was the handyman who had cleaned the gutters and washed windows recently. In a desk in Mrs. Edwards’s living room Coursey found her bank statements, and in the December statement was the check written to Elmore; he had cashed it at the local branch of Bankers Trust before it closed on New Year’s Eve.

  Late in the afternoon, just before dark, another SLED agent, Tom Henderson, arrived from Columbia. Henderson had grown up across the street from Dorothy Edwards in a lovely ranch-style house on a wooded lot. When his mother, Christine, had seen the police cars and learned that her neighbor had been murdered, she called her son. He jumped into his car and sped to Greenwood.

  Greenwood, however, wasn’t Henderson’s turf; Charley Webber was the resident SLED agent. Webber was a roly-poly, jovial sort who wore his hair long, as he had when he was the trumpet player with the Swingin’ Medallions, before he had become a law enforcement officer. He was driving down the street late Monday afternoon when police chief John Young honked for him to pull over. Young told Webber there had been a murder on Melrose Terrace and asked if he would go there. When Webber arrived, he asked Coursey if he needed help. Coursey said no. There was some bad blood between the men since they had both sought the position with SLED and Coursey had been rejected.

  Coursey hadn’t asked for Henderson either, but his offer to help was accepted. Henderson, thirty-nine years old, had been at SLED ten years, after stumbling through early adulthood. “I went to three colleges, five different times, and it took me eleven years to graduate,” Henderson said. “Needless to say, I didn’t give a damn.” He’d also had two stints in the army, including a tour in Vietnam with the Special Forces. The Henderson-for-Webber switch was costly for Elmore. In less than twenty-four hours, Henderson was convinced that Elmore was guilty, a conviction from which he never wavered, while Webber would harbor doubts, which he largely kept to himself.

  Robbery did not appear to be the motive for the crime. Mrs. Edwards’s $10,000 diamond ring and other valuable jewelry were in plain sight in her bedroom. “Large amounts of silver. Antique silver not disturbed,” Johnson said in his report. The only things missing, the police concluded—and this was based on what Holloway told them—were Mrs. Edwards’s clutch purse and a .32-caliber pistol, which Holloway said she kept in the nightstand drawer. There was no evidence that she had used the gun, or even tried to, against her attacker.

  Indeed, the indications were that she knew her attacker. “It did appear that she was not afraid of the suspect because she had a night chain on the back kitchen door but she did not put it in place and slightly open door but open it wide,” Johnson noted in his report. The door had four windowpanes, so she would have seen who her visitor was before letting him in. That alone caused her neighbor Roy Raborn to doubt that Elmore had been the perpetrator. He just couldn’t believe that Mrs. Edwards would open the door to a black man late on a Saturday night, even one she knew a bit. “You would be stupid,” Raborn said. “I wouldn’t do it.” And a woman would be even less likely do so if she was dressed in her nightgown.

  There was a curious dearth of fingerprints at the crime scene. The SLED forensic investigators found none on the needle-nose pliers lying on the kitchen floor or on the tongs, which were sticking out of the drawer, or on the bloody cake spatula found on the bureau.

  Some ten hours after the first policeman had arrived at 209 Melrose Terrace, Sergeant Owen, and Herman Tooley Jr. of the Blyth Funeral Home, took possession of Mrs. Edwards’s body from DeFreese and Parnell and took it to Self Memorial Hospital, nine minutes away. Owen recorded this in his report. It was placed in a cooler, at a temperature of thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. The cooler was sealed with evidence tape; Owen signed it. The next morning, at 6:00, Owen was back at the hospital. The body was removed from the cooler, and he and Tom McHaney, another Blyth employee, drove it across the state to the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston, for an autopsy by Dr. Sandra E. Conradi. They arrived at 10:15.

  Six hours later, Owen left the medical school and drove Mrs. Edwards’s body to SLED headquarters in Columbia. This was unusual. After an autopsy, a body would normally go to the funeral home. At SLED, Owen and agent Parnell took fingerprints and palm prints from Mrs. Edwards. That explained why the body had been brought to SLED but raised the question of why her fingerprints were needed.

  Back in Greenwood, Captain Coursey went to a judge and sought a warrant for the arrest of Edward Lee Elmore. “Probable cause is based on the following facts,” Coursey said in his affidavit to the judge. “The deceased body of Dorothy E. Edwards was found at her home at 209 Melrose Terrace, Greenwood, South Carolina, on January 18, 1982, with multiple stab wounds and idencia of her being the victim of rape. A fingerprint of Edward Lee Elmore was found at this residence.”

  This was shaky. Under the Fourth Amendment, the police may not arrest someone without “probable cause.” Basically, that means there has to be enough evidence to convince a reasonable person of the substantial likelihood that the person being arrested committed the crime. Since Elmore had been at Mrs. Edwards’s house in December, washing windows for her, it was reasonable that the print was left then. In fact, it might have been there several weeks, or possibly even months. “I can say whose print it was; I can’t say when it was put there,” SLED agent DeFreese would later testify. Curiously, the police had found only one Elmore fingerprint at the scene.

  In his request for a warrant, Coursey did not mention the check that Mrs. Edwards had given to Elmore. Even the check plus the fingerprint would not seem to amount to probable cause. Magistrate Charles E. Henderson Jr. issued the warran
t.

  THE SUSPECT—EDWARD LEE ELMORE

  EDWARD LEE ELMORE had grown up in the abject sort of environment that led President Lyndon Johnson to declare a war on poverty. Home was Abbeville, a historic small town fourteen miles west of Greenwood on tree-lined Route 72. John C. Calhoun practiced law there from 1807 to 1817 before becoming vice president, secretary of state, senator, and secretary of war. The first Confederate Assembly adopted the Ordinance of Secession here in 1860. A granite plinth rises in the town square, erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy of Abbeville. The inscription on one side: “The world shall yet decide in truth’s clear, far-off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray and died with Lee, were in the right.” The monument was erected in 1906, destroyed by a fire in 1991, and repaired and put up again by the town in 1996, more than 130 years after the end of the Civil War.

  When Elmore was growing up, the “niggers” had their part of town and entered the white areas only to work in the textile mills or as maids or yardmen. They were paid so little that even a middle-class family could afford to employ them. For blacks and whites alike, Greenwood was “the big city,” the place to go to the cinema and, in the days before malls and fast-food chains, to shop at Rosenberg’s, a clothing store that had been around since 1884, or to eat at The Ranch, a good restaurant. Blacks found Greenwood more racist than Abbeville.

  Edward’s mother, Mary Ellen Gardner, was the daughter of a tenant farmer. She was so tiny as a baby, and the family was so poor, that she slept in a drawer. She was sixteen when she had her first child. She’d had a second and was pregnant with her third when she married Henry Odey Elmore. They had a son and a daughter, pneumonia and malnutrition claimed another son in his infancy, then came another daughter, and a year later Mary was pregnant again. In her eighth month, she was diagnosed with toxemia, which can be fatal or result in a mentally retarded child. Mary was hospitalized. After ten days, labor was induced. Edward Lee was born on January 13, 1959.

  Henry Elmore was listed as Edward’s father, but it is unlikely he was his biological father. Edward had reddish hair and a light complexion. Edward’s siblings and playmates taunted him that he had a white father. “His skin was lighter than mine,” said Elmore’s sister Peggy, whose biological father was Henry. When Edward was about two years old, Henry was struck by a car as he walked along Highway 17 in North Carolina. The driver didn’t stop. Henry died. The police never did find who hit him. “Probably didn’t try very hard,” says Peggy. “You know, black man.”

  After Henry was killed there were always men around Mary, white and black. Some stayed a few hours, others longer. Earl Johnson was around the longest, maybe four or five years, during Edward’s early adolescence. He was hardly a role model. He would go into a grocery store and furtively take a package of meat, go off to another aisle, pummel the package a bit, then insist that the grocer give him the meat or sell it at a reduced price.

  Drinking and violence were part of the scene, and Edward learned to stay away from his mother’s male friends. When Mary got drunk, he would stay away from her as well. She was jailed several times for disorderly conduct. She began giving her son beer at an early age. The family moved from one dilapidated house to another, many without electricity or running water, ahead of the rent collector or after the rent collector had caught up with and evicted them. One day, Eddie and Peggy got off the school bus in front of their public housing apartment and saw their belongings on the street; the family had been evicted again. Shamed and embarrassed, they walked on to a relative’s house.

  The children picked cotton and peaches and picked up bottles along the roadside. “You’d get five cents from those bottles,” Peggy recalled. “We’d buy little stuff to eat, like ice cream.” On Sundays little Edward walked barefoot with his mother to Calhoun Falls Baptist Church.

  Edward started attending Branch Street Elementary School when he was six. He didn’t yet know his colors. Asked to draw a man, he drew two circles, connected them with a diagonal line, and put a squiggly tail on the bottom circle. He was absent more than a third of the time, often because he was forced to scrounge for money, picking up bottles or whatever. He was in the first grade for three years. In the second grade, the kids teased him because he was slow and dim-witted, with speech defects and tics, and his clothes were ragged. His IQ was measured at 61, which psychologists classify as within the range of “mild mental retardation.” He quit after the first semester. Edward was twelve years old before he made it to the third grade, at the Langley Milliken School, a quarter of a mile from a large mill. He and Peggy were among the eight blacks sent to integrate the school. They didn’t cause any problems. “We got along, we really got along,” Peggy said. Peggy and Eddie were close. When she became a teenager and the boys started calling, Eddie would lie on the couch pretending to be asleep, then open one eye and say to the visitor, with a smile, “I got my eye on you.”

  Edward was “soft-voiced,” a teacher noted on his report card. He “likes school—likes playing ball—dislikes spelling most.” Even though he couldn’t do the work, teachers promoted him through the third and fourth grades. In fifth grade, he dropped out, barely able to read at a second-grade level. He was fourteen but said he was sixteen in order to get a job at the J.P. Stevens textile plant in Abbeville. The machine he worked on would have to be shut down occasionally because of mistakes he made. He didn’t like the noise or being inside, and he quit. He wanted to try school again. He was sixteen and school officials thought the other fifth-graders would laugh at him, so they put him into the eighth grade at Wright Middle School. There was no way he could handle that level of work, and after twelve days he dropped out.

  As an adult, Elmore would not be able to tell time or draw a clock. He didn’t understand the concept of north, south, east, and west or of summer, fall, winter, and spring. He briefly had a checking account but was unable to do the elementary math necessary to have enough in the bank to cover the checks he would write. He never lived on his own. He gave his money to his mother and a girlfriend to pay his bills, as he didn’t know how.

  He was, however, a steady, trustworthy handyman. He was taken on by Clarence Aiken, a black general contractor who lived on the rough side—he had been shot in a bar brawl and had lost an arm in an automobile accident. Aiken trusted Elmore with the keys to the Abbeville County Courthouse when they were cleaning there. Elmore worked for two weeks cleaning and painting inside the palatial Spartanburg home of Roger Milliken, the textile magnate and one of the richest men in the South. There were never any complaints about his work or his stealing anything.

  Elmore worked hard, doing chores around people’s homes in some of the most fashionable neighborhoods of Greenwood. In a good week, in good weather, he might earn $600; most of the time he earned between $200 and $300. Many of his customers were elderly widows, friends and neighbors of Dorothy Edwards’s. They liked him. “He was a black man that southern women got along with,” recalled James Bradford, a lawyer. Elmore painted and did odd jobs for Bradford’s mother and his mother-in-law. He was polite, deferential, sweet-natured—in a word, he was “servile,” as blacks were supposed to be. Slight of build, he was not at all physically threatening.

  Elmore’s history was notably void of any clashes with the law. He was never arrested for drugs or drinking. Indeed, he had no criminal record whatsoever, except for a few minor charges arising out of fights with his girlfriend, Mary Dunlap.

  They had met at the Depot, a Greenwood nightclub. “Oh, he’s so handsome,” she said to her girlfriend when she saw him in the crowd. He was taut and had an Afro with a slight reddish tint. She was five foot six, lithe, and beautiful. He came over, introduced himself, and asked her to dance. “That done it, he was my date for the night,” she remembered, a glint in her eyes even many years later. She invited him back to her apartment. He was proper. They had a couple of beers, and he left.

  A week later, she saw him again at the Depot. “That night he stayed over,” she sa
ys. Their relationship had begun. She was eight years older and married, with two small children. After she separated from her husband, Elmore moved in. She lived in the Greenwood Gardens Apartments, a small complex of two-story buildings on the south side—the black side—of Greenwood. Mary’s apartment, on the ground floor, had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen—and three televisions. Elmore brought all his clothes; Mary didn’t need a second closet for them.

  It was a tempestuous relationship. She was temperamental. He was jealous. “He just wanted me all to hisself,” she said. “He didn’t want me to do anything unless he was right there.” Especially, he didn’t like her running around in short shorts and skimpy singlets. That would set off near-childish temper tantrums. But he was a good man. He babysat her children. He gave her money for household expenses. Though he had smoked marijuana as a youngster, he didn’t use drugs. He drank beer but didn’t get drunk. When he wasn’t working, he’d stay at home and watch sports on TV.

  They quarreled regularly, and on two or three occasions she complained to the police that he had hit her. She declined to press charges, and some doubted the incidents had ever occurred. There was a correlation between Mary’s complaints to the police about Elmore and the failure of her ex-husband to make child support payments. Was Mary taking out her anger at her ex-husband on her new boyfriend? In November 1981, for instance, Mary filed charges against her ex-husband; the next day, she filed a complaint against Elmore, claiming he had hit her. This time she signed a warrant. Elmore was arrested. He pleaded guilty and was fined $212, all but $40 suspended. Ten days later she called the police and said he had taken her pocketbook out of the car and stolen $60. She declined to prosecute. After that he moved out, but they continued to see each other—and to fight.