The Algiers Motel Incident
Page 8
A. Yes.
Q. And what were you employed as?
A. A beautician.
Q. And how long were you so employed?
A. About six months.
Q. Did you graduate from high school?
A. No.
Q. How far did you go in school?
A. About eleven and three-quarter years.
Q. Who did you live with in Columbus, Ohio?
A. My parents, and then I had an apartment of my own.
Q. Who did you come to Detroit with?
A. Karen Malloy and Nancy Stallnaker.
Q. And was Karen Malloy also from Columbus, Ohio?
A. Yes.
Q. What was your reason for coming to Detroit?
A. We just thought we would move to Detroit.
Q. You just thought you would move to Detroit?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. How did you get to Detroit? What did you use for transportation?
A. Some kids came up. They were coming up this way so they brought us up.
Q. And where did you stay when you came to Detroit?
A. Pontchartrain.
Q. And how long did you stay at the Pontchartrain?
A. A week.
Q. Why did you leave the Pontchartrain?
A. Because it was too expensive.
Q. Well, did you pay your bill when you left the Pontchartrain?
A. My parents paid mine.
Q. I said did you pay your bill when you left the Pontchartrain?
A. No.
Q. Did you run out on the bill at the Pontchartrain? . . .
A. Yes.
Q. All right. Now where did you move from the Pontchartrain Hotel?
A. At the Pallister, I believe. . . .
Q. And how long did you stay at the Pallister?
A. A week or so.
Q. And what were you doing for a living at the Pallister Hotel?
A. I wasn’t doing anything for a living. I was on vacation.
Q. You were on vacation?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. How long did you remain on vacation before you went back to work?
A. I haven’t went back to work yet. . . .
Q. All right. Now when did you move to the Algiers Motel?
A. After we left the Pallister.
Q. All right. And when was that? Can you give me a date?
A. I can’t remember. [In her statement to the police, earlier, she had given July 22 as the date; Karen had said July 21.] . . .
Q. And what apartment or room in the Algiers did you take when you moved there?
A. 12-A.
Q. And did you take it along with anyone else?
A. Karen and Nancy.
Q. And did Nancy stay there then until the 26th of July? Was she there on the 26th?
A. No, I believe she left the 24th or the 25th.
Q. So that left you and Karen in that apartment at the Algiers Motel?
A. Yes. . . .
Q. You were registered at the Motel, were you?
A. Yes, I was.
Q. In your name?
A. No.
Q. In what name?
A. I didn’t register personally. Someone else registered.
Q. Who registered?
A. Someone else.
Q. Yes. Who registered for you, Miss Hysell? You are under oath. Who registered for you at that Motel?
A. I don’t know.
Q. How did you get to that Motel originally?
A. I took a cab.
Q. A cab physically took you to the Motel and you got out of the car, of the cab, right?
A. That’s correct.
Q. Now, there came a point in time and place when you were registered, is that not true?
A. That’s correct.
Q. Did you walk out of the taxicab and into the office of the Motel?
A. No, I didn’t.
Q. Where did you go?
A. I walked over and was talking to some people.
Q. And then did you go and register at the office?
A. No, one of the fellows registered.
Q. Who registered?
A. I don’t know. It was somebody Nancy knew. . . .
Q. Did she go to the Algiers Motel with you?
A. Yes. . . .
Q. And how is it that you knew to go to room A-12?
A. Well, we stood there until they came back with the key.
Q. And I asked you who this was.
A. I am not sure. I don’t want to say.
Q. In your best recollection and judgment, who was it?
A. I don’t know. There was four or five fellows standing around.
Q. Did you know any of them?
A. Not then.
Q. Not then?
A. No. I had seen them.
Q. Did you know them subsequently?
A. I know them vaguely.
Q. What are their names?
A. I don’t know their last name. . . .
Q. All right. Did you thereafter learn their names?
A. Their first names. I never bother with last names. . . .
Q. How much money did you originally come to Detroit with?
A. A couple of dollars.
Q. And how much did it cost you to stay at the Algiers Motel every evening you were there?
A. Ten dollars.
Q. Ten dollars a night?
A. Uh-huh. . . .
Q. How did you pay for this?
A. My parents sent me money.
Q. Your parents sent you money?
A. Uh-huh.
Q. How did they send you this money?
A. Western Union.
Q. And how often did they send you money?
A. Any time I called them and asked for it.
Q. How much money in total have your parents sent you since this thing took place?
A. Oh, probably about a thousand dollars. . . .
16. Sanctuary
The riot had by late Saturday afternoon pretty well subsided. One crucial problem the city had was where to put all its prisoners. More than seven thousand had been arrested, and almost all were being held on high bail. Wayne County Jail was crammed, and so were police hoosegows and garages, both at Headquarters and at the precincts; busloads of arrestees had been sent to Jackson State Prison and the federal prison at Milan.
Late Saturday afternoon, Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan, a man with a smooth, waxy complexion that makes him seem exceptionally scrubbed and decent, as a public prosecutor should be, and with a tendency to trip over little words in his speech, which makes him seem eager even under pressure, as he should be, too, went (as he told me later) to city-owned Belle Isle, in the Detroit River, to inspect the bathhouse there, to see whether it could serve as a place of incarceration. It was, eventually, made into one, and it was dubbed Belcatraz—“with every cell a showerbath.” Police Commissioner Ray Girardin told me that access to Belle Isle, over a single bridge, had been shut off early in the riot. There were memories of Detroit’s vicious race riot of 1943, which started there; and there was, besides, a sudden concern about two private clubs that leased quarters there on public ground, the Yacht Club and the Boat Club, which excluded Negroes from their membership—even “white” Negroes who owned yachts (according to J. Anthony Lukas in The New York Times Magazine of August 27, 1967: among the yachts that had lined up along the course of the annual speedboat race in the Detroit River on the Fourth of July, 1967, nineteen days before the riot, at least thirty were owned by Negroes). This made Belle Isle a peaceful sanctuary, and after his inspection of Belcatraz, Prosecutor Cahalan joined Joseph Schirmer, a photographer, on Schirmer’s yacht for a session of sociability and escape from the worries of office. The interlude was destined to be short.
17. A Great Probability
“Attorney S. Allen Early called and said that he had the two girls who were involved in the incident,” Leon Atchison told me, “and that he wanted to bring them down and give a statement along with every
body else. Because our temporary office was in the Retail Store Employees Union Hall, and they had to close at five o’clock, we had to advise everyone who wanted to make complaints after that time to come down to Nathan Conyers’s office, and of course the Justice Department was in town at that time also. Early brought the two girls down, and Mr. Davis and Mr. Temple and Cleveland Reed and Charles Moore came down to Nathan Conyers’s office and gave statements. And the Justice Department, Mr. Bob Murphy, was also there. Mr. Murphy wound up with all of the material.
“It was clear to me that their statements were enough alike, and they didn’t really know each other, that there was some substance to it. We felt that if you added the other ingredient, that the police had failed to report the shootings to their superiors, it was really the motel employees that reported the bodies, then there was a great probability that the police did in fact commit murder there.
“We had faith that the Justice Department would move in on this matter and see to it that if the Prosecutor’s Office and the Police Department failed to do the kind of job that should be done, they would do it. Everyone there felt, all of the witnesses and ourselves, we felt that would be the case. We didn’t have any faith in the Police Department investigating itself on this. Mr. Cahalan, the new prosecutor, came in with a pretty good reputation, but we had to take a sort of wait-and-see attitude on what he was really going to do. So therefore we went the federal route, to make sure that something was done.
“We’re not sure how the Free Press found out that we were having this meeting at Nathan Conyers’s office. During the meeting Mr. Luedtke called from the Free Press and asked us not to release any information that we had gathered at this meeting, because he felt that it would jeopardize his investigation; he really felt that he was on top of the situation.
“But S. Allen Early, for some unknown reason, on a pretext of taking one of the girls [Karen] out to get a cup of coffee, took her over to the Prosecutor’s Office,” which summoned Mr. Cahalan posthaste from Joe Schirmer’s yacht. “And the next thing we knew the police, the Prosecutor’s Office, was calling us, asking for the other girl. Senator Coleman Young took the other girl over. That was their first contact with the two girls.”
18. Oh, God! Oh, God!
Eddie Temple had gone straight from the press conference earlier in the day to his brother’s funeral at White House Funeral Directors. Larry Reed and Rod Davis were late. “I went over there,” Larry told me, “but I couldn’t make it in. I tried to get there late, so I wouldn’t have to look at the body. It was already closed when I got there.” One of the Temple twins, Herbert, also missed the funeral. “He was a blue baby when he was born,” Mrs. Temple told me, “and the doctor warned me the child might have trouble. He took a car, about a year ago, and they sentenced him to one to one and a half years up at [the Michigan State Reformatory at] Ionia. They held him downtown for four whole months, and he’s had nearly a year up there.” “He could have come,” Ella Temple Clark told me, “they would have let him come, but he would have had to have two policemen escorting him, and Mother couldn’t stand the idea of having policemen at the funeral.”
——
“Carl,” Mrs. Gill told me, “didn’t have no front, he didn’t have no chest, no stomach, no privates, no organs, or nothing.” (The charge of deliberate castration of Carl Cooper was to come up later. Both autopsies noted shotgun wounds of the left thigh, but neither made any mention of damage to Cooper’s genitals. Dr. Raven’s diagram of the anterior view of his body shows this wound as on the outer part of the thigh, and she wrote, “There is a large area of abrasion of the left anterior thigh region, measuring approximately 4″ × 2½″, with a number of punctate wounds in this abraded area.” Dr. Sillery wrote, “The wound here is superficial and involves only skin and subcutaneous tissue.” As to the radical and damaging nature of the other wounds there was no doubt in either doctor’s report.) “They had Carl padded, you know,” Mrs. Gill went on. “He couldn’t hold the fluid. He was pretty well messed up. The undertaker told me that they worked with him all day to get him ready for showing. Took all day. He said, ‘Don’t touch him,’ because I mean they had to change his hands the next day where he was turning dark, they had to pack him, he couldn’t hold the fluid, you know.”
Carl’s funeral at the Swanson Funeral Home was described in a supplement on riots in the September-October 1968 issue of Trans-Action, a magazine published at Washington University, St. Louis:
“Cooper’s funeral was a Jessica Mitford affair held in a funeral home so ‘tasteful’ that it looked like an architect’s drawing rather than a building in use. Clark was one of the pallbearers. ‘I knew Carl since we was little kids.’ Cooper’s family and friends seemed the sort known as ‘the good people of the Negro community.’ They were decorous people, well-dressed and driving good cars. They were not necessarily middle class, but they were urban people, not poverty-stricken Southern migrants dressed uncomfortably in their mail-order suits and Sunday dresses. The body was lying in an open coffin. The minister offered his comforting best to a background of weeping. After everyone had passed the body, curtains were drawn across the front of the room, hiding the pulpit and the body. Suddenly, the room erupted in a surge of emotion. Women screamed and several charged the curtain only to be led away by attendants. The family seating section lost all semblance of regularity as women began to rock back and forth, and soon everyone was moving around the room. The funeral director eyed his watch; another cortege was waiting to move into the chapel. The women who had been led away went back into the room. The minister offered more words and then the curtains were reopened and Clark and the other pallbearers moved the coffin out to the hearse.”
——
“Those calls and letters,” Mrs. Pollard told me, “commenced to come in before the funeral and after the funeral. The letters were dirty letters. One of them said, ‘I’m a National Guard’s wife and damn proud of it,’ said, ‘Negro hoods running the streets, they will not stop until they all be stuck like a zombie,’ they wasn’t supposed to be living, and all that. ‘Your pimp-ass son, we’re glad he’s dead.’ Your pimp-ass son. How in hell she know he was a pimp? He was drawing compensation, a pimp ain’t going to work in no factory. The phone calls, once it was a man and once it was a woman, they saying if the police got any time, they would see that I’d be dead. They said I’d die a little harder than Auburey died, said he died hard enough, but if the police got any time, if we pressed any charges, must remember we’d die just like him. If anything happened to a policeman, well, I’d get a worse death than my son got. Way I feel, I ain’t got too much to live for anyway.
“See, when I taken Chaney to the undertakers to see Auburey, you know, we got ready, I was going to touch his head, you know, I wanted to feel of him, you know. Undertaker told me, he say, ‘No, no, don’t touch him.’ Said he just got him pieced together, because they naturally tore him up. Said, ‘Don’t touch him, Mrs. Pollard.’ The undertaker was the R. T. Wilson Funeral Home. I don’t think he’d been in business too long, but he said that if I would subpoena him, he’d come into court and tell just what kind of shape he got him out of the morgue, because they cut him up so bad his mortician had a hard time trying to put him back together. They did a awful bum job on him. That’s the reason I sent the Free Press man out there, after he told me they done cut him up so bad I just figured we could take an autopsy too, you know. So when they took this autopsy they didn’t see no whiskey or beer or alcohol or dope or anything on him.
“So then when they told me, ‘Don’t touch him,’ Chaney, he started to hollering and screaming and going on, hollering, Oh, God! Oh, God!’ You know what he said? ‘Momma, they don’t kill them in Vietnam like that! They don’t torture them then shoot them or blow them up when they got through with them. Momma, they don’t stand them up and beat their face off before they kill them,’ he said. ‘Momma, they did worse than if they caught one of them Vietnams out there.’ We had to carry Chaney out
of there. He just went to pieces. He said, ‘Just wait till I get my men over here. Just wait till my crew comes. When my crew comes we’re going to show them something. We’ll set them booby traps. We’ll bomb them. We know we can get them. Just wait.’ Till all the police looked at him like they was going to kill him. See, I knew he was out of his head. He’d say, ‘There’s a man out there following me.’ He didn’t trust nobody, wanted to lock everything up. He thought everybody was going to kill me.”
19. Executed
On Sunday, July 30, Joseph Strickland, a star reporter of the Detroit News, having traced Robert Greene, the paratrooper veteran of Vietnam who had been at the Algiers on the night of the killings, to his home in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, flew down to Hopkinsville with Detective Schlachter and Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Jesse B. Eggleton. On that same day, as it happened, Kurt Luedtke of the Free Press decided to break the long silence about the Algiers incident.
Luedtke’s front-page story, which hit the stands Sunday evening, was unsensational; on inside pages, another article gave details of the Free Press investigation. Luedtke wrote that the paper’s information “indicates that the men were killed inside the building and not by police or soldiers firing into the house. . . . Officials now fear that the three Negroes were deliberately executed.”
One of these officials, according to Luedtke, said, “The big question is who did it, and there are a dozen theories about that.”
20. I’ll Never Forget That Face
Strickland’s story from Hopkinsville, which appeared on the front page of the News the next morning, was sensational indeed. “An eyewitness located here by The Detroit News,” it began, “told Detroit and Wayne County investigators today that he saw a white National Guard warrant officer shoot to death two Detroit Negro youths at a Woodward Avenue motel during the riot.”
Strickland quoted Greene as having said, presumably to him, “I saw the National Guard officer kill two of the boys.” Greene, Strickland reported, “said he would be able to identify the National Guard officer. . . . ‘I’ll never forget that face.’ ” (Greene, however, who was taken from Hopkinsville to Detroit by Detective Schlachter after the questioning, was unable to pick that face out of the line at a show-up in the Detroit Police Headquarters that very next night; this peculiar episode will unwind itself later in this narrative.)