by John Hersey
“And then some more shooting started down the block there,” Greene told Eggleton. “All of them rushed out of the Manor house there and ran down the block. Two policemen were left there.”
“And then I heard some more shooting from outside,” Michael, who was still lying on the floor in A-4 at the time of which he was speaking, testified. “And then some of the officers and all of them went outside because I heard—let’s see, the soldier told me, he say, ‘That’s another one of your friends out there shooting at us.’ ”
“I remember,” Sortor testified, “that I heard officers say they were shooting down the street, and some of them ran out—ran out of there, and that’s when the officer—when they left, this officer went into this room and got Michael and them up, and they told us we could leave.”
2. Solicitude
Despite the sudden fear he said he had felt, Warrant Officer Thomas did not, after all, leave. He was soon to be found in room A-4 again, with Patrolman August, the naked girl, and the half-naked girl. “These two,” Karen (the one who had lost all her clothes but her panties) told Early, “were very nice.”
“They then took K and J into a room (A-4),” Early’s notes said. “ ‘What was the trouble?’ They said they didn’t know and they didn’t ask them any more. These two were very nice. Thought Juli should go to the hospital. . . . The cop asked them if they had any robes. J & K said, ‘No.’ Told them to get out and get a robe.”
According to the Thomas synopsis, “Warrant Officer Thomas was then asked to escort the girls to the Algiers Motel next door; as he was leaving he was joined by private watchman Dismukes and Pfc. Henson.”
“I believe,” Thomas testified, “it was Officer Senak that asked me to escort the women back to the motel room, their own motel room. . . . Myself, Henson, and Mr. Dismukes escorted these women back. . . . Henson, myself, and Mr. Dismukes went to the girls’ room, and when they opened the door there was a colored fellow laying on the bed, and Mr. Dismukes approached him and shook the bed and woke him up. He was sleeping. And I held him at, you know, in custody more or less until Mr. Dismukes went in and checked the girl’s cut on her head because she was bleeding so severely that, to see if she needed medical attention right away. I asked Mr. Dismukes to do this. And he went over and he said, ‘Well, it look like it will take a couple of stitches.’ ” (Juli had seven stitches; she also testified she suffered a slight concussion and developed a black eye.) “So I warned the girls, I told them to stay in the room until after five-thirty, until after the curfew lifted . . . and then came out because they are liable to get in trouble if they come out of the motel. I was satisfied that the girls did not need medical attention right away because she had almost stopped bleeding.”
3. Get the Hell Out
“And this police,” Greene told Eggleton, “he told us . . . ‘Get out of here, because I don’t want to see you get killed like the rest of them.’ So we started out the back way. The two girls, they went out the front. . . . I told them I wasn’t going out there on the street. So he said, ‘You better get the hell out of here if you want to live.’ And I went through A-2, where the guy was lying in a pool of blood. I went over to the office and stayed there until the next morning.”
“They told us to get out fast,” Charles Moore said to a reporter from the Free Press. “Said, ‘We’re going to come back and kill all you niggers.’ ”
“Paille,” Sortor told me, “went in the room and told Michael and this guy”—Roderick—“to come out of there, they can go. Asked us, did we like policemen? We say, ‘Yeah!’ The guy says, where we live at? I told him I lived in Joy Road, gave a wrong address. Said we could go. They just told us to keep on going, don’t come back. This one guy asked could he go back and get his pants or shoes, one. That’s all I remember. I was trying to get on out.”
Roderick, who had been left lying on the floor in A-4, said to me, “A policeman told me to get off the floor and get out in the hallway. He said to leave out; he said, ‘Start walking in the direction you’re going with your hands above your head, and if you look back, we’ll kill you, because we’ll be following you all the way home.’ Fred Temple asked could he go back to the room and get his shoes and shirt. I passed him. Larry was just ahead of me. They told Fred it would be all right to go and get his stuff. I was too scared to go for my shoes, I just kept on walking in my socks. Out through the back rooms. Almost stepped on a body. That really scared me, because I hadn’t seen it before, see, and they shot in the floor by me in the room there, so I didn’t think they were really killing people.”
——
Both Roderick Davis and Larry Reed said under oath in court that they had seen Fred Temple in the hallway at the very end. This was Roderick’s testimony:
Q. When did you last see Temple?
A. In the line as we were going out the room—out the building.
Q. Beg pardon?
A. I saw him in the hallway as we were going out the building.
Q. Do you know where he was going?
A. I believe he was supposed to have been going out like the rest of us were.
Q. Did he go out like the rest of you did?
A. No.
Q. Did you hear him talk to anybody about permission to go to his room?
A. Yes.
Q. Well, what did he say, what did you hear him say?
A. Could he go back and get his belongings or clothes or shoes, one.
Q. Did anybody go back there with him?
A. I don’t know. We were walking out.
Prosecutor Weiswasser questioned Larry Reed on the same point:
Q. When was the last time you saw Fred Temple?
A. The last time I saw him was when we were at the hotel, just before I left, when the police let us go.
Q. Do you know where he was going?
A. The last I saw him I heard him ask about some shoes, and I never did see him after that again.
——
“We went outside,” Sortor testified. “Some more officers, they stopped us over there. . . . And then they asked us where we was coming from. We said, ‘The motel.’ And they said, ‘Who let you all go?’ And we said, ‘Them police officers over there.’ ”
VI
AFTERMATH
30
A MATTER FOR INVESTIGATION
1. Puzzles
And so we find ourselves back again at the beginning of this book. The harrowing incident is over; the witnesses are scattering. Robert Greene goes to the motel office and spends the rest of the night there; Charles Moore gets in his car and drives home—so he says. Michael goes to the Mount Royal and calls Carl’s parents to tell them Carl has been killed. Rod and Larry, washed by the light of a locomotive, fall in the hands of the Hamtramck police. Lee and Sortor run to Carl’s house and collapse there, panting out the story. . . .
Gradually, as the hours and days pass, a stench rises, and the Algiers Motel incident becomes a matter for investigation. By midday on Monday, July 31, five days after the incident, the newspapers have broken the story; the News has bannered Robert Greene’s accusations that a National Guard warrant officer was the principal killer; and perhaps it is the shock of the publicity that impels Ronald August and Robert Paille to confess, during the day, that their hands held guns that killed, or helped to kill, two of the three victims, Auburey Pollard and Fred Temple.
It is by now, on Monday, July 31, clear that the killings in the Algiers were not executions of snipers, looters, or arsonists caught red-handed in felonious crimes in the heat of a riot, but rather that they were murders embellished by racist abuse, indiscriminate vengeance, sexual jealousy, voyeurism, wanton blood-letting, and sadistic physical and mental tortures characterized by the tormentors as “a game.” Yet, in detail, much that is puzzling remains (and please do not expect all that is still mystifying to be cleared up in this book, for it will not be): Who killed Carl Cooper? Did more than one man kill Cooper? What was the role of David Senak, whom Paille,
in his confession, implicated? What was the extent of Warrant Officer Thomas’s actual guilt? What did Dismukes do? Were the state troopers blameless of crimes they would not curb? When and how, and under the muzzles of how many guns, was Fred Temple killed? Was Temple killed, as Carl Cooper apparently was, during the first wild rush into the building, or was his murder the last inning of the death game?
2. Show-ups
That evening Carl Cooper’s stepfather, Omar Gill, took Sortor, Lee, and Michael to police headquarters for show-ups. Though the detectives had garnered two confessions, they wanted corroborating witnesses and a lead to Carl Cooper’s killer. Karen and Juli were also on hand. Against a wall under bright lights a row of white men—members of the Detroit police force who had been in or near the Algiers that night—stood in civilian clothes, and each witness was given about three minutes alone in the room to pick out the beaters and shooters. After all the witnesses had gone through, another line-up followed, of Guardsmen who had been around the motel that night. The show-ups were not a success. Michael and Sortor both identified Paille as one who had bullied them, and Sortor made one misidentification; otherwise all drew blanks. In court later the defense lawyers would try to make much of the failures of identification during these show-ups.
“When they went to the line-up,” Omar Gill told me, “they were afraid. After Lee talked to the FBI man downtown, this is what he said to Lee, he said, ‘Now you stay close to home because we don’t know what might happen.’ Now, why would the FBI man say that?”
“To know the terror,” Eddie Temple, Fred’s brother, said to me, “that they had installed in them at this point! I’m surprised that they could recognize any one of them, because these boys were just terrified. You talked to them and they were in a different world.”
——
“The girls, of course, were very frightened,” Leon Atchison of Congressman Conyers’s office said to me. “They would not go down to the Prosecutor’s Office unaccompanied. They didn’t want to go down there by themselves. So that the Prosecutor’s Office, in order to get in touch with the girls, had to call us, and then we would get in touch with the girls and take them down. They said they wanted the girls to come over and look at a line-up. So we went over about ten thirty in the evening, Coleman Young, myself, and the two girls.
“One thing that really struck me: When we got in the elevator, we were the first on the elevator, then about six National Guardsmen and several police officers crowded on the elevator, and the girls’ reaction was just fantastic. If they could have gone through the back wall of the elevator they would have done it; they were just cringing and shivering, until the men got off at a floor before we got off.
“Then we got up to the Prosecutor’s Office and turned the girls over, and we sat there in the lobby to wait for them, and we wondered why it took so long, you know, for them in the line-up. We were there about two hours, which made us rather suspicious.
“During that time two plain-clothes officers came over and said they wanted to question the girls before we took them back, about another matter. The Senator and I objected to that; we said that we brought them over specifically to look at a line-up, and we would not want them questioned without Nathan Conyers, their attorney. They were a little bit upset at that. So we told them that we just wouldn’t permit them to question the girls at twelve o’clock at night without any attorney or preparation. And they continued to stall, seemingly, with bringing the girls back to us.
“Finally Juli’s parent showed up, her mother, her father, and an aunt who lives in Detroit. The mother was crying and the father was very upset. They asked her such questions as, ‘Do you know what you’re mixed up in now?’ And, ‘Why didn’t you call us? You know you’re in a lot of trouble.’ And, ‘We’re going to take you back home.’ Juli is a very headstrong girl, and she was insisting that she was not going back home with them. She said, ‘I’m eighteen years old, and you can’t tell me what to do any more, and I’m not going back home with you.’
“We were standing there waiting to take them back to the Algiers, where they were still staying, and the father said, ‘You might as well go ahead, because she’s going to stay with us, she’s not going back with you.’ And then they tried to talk to the other girl, into going with them also, and she just walked away from them; she said she was not going back. Then Juli broke down in tears, and went into hysterics, said they were treating her like a baby, insisting that she would not go with them. But the father became very insistent and asked us to leave, so we left with the other girl and took her back to the Algiers. Strangely enough they were still staying there. They figured that would be the last place anybody would look for them. One weekend they did go to Canada because they were frightened, and they just left a number where some of their friends could get in touch with them, so if anything urgent came up we could get ahold of them. They were very, very frightened and it seemed that after that, the whole movement on the part of the Police Department was to portray them as prostitutes, so as to destroy their credibility as witnesses. My view on that is: Whether they were prostitutes or not, I don’t think that that has any bearing on what they saw and what they did in fact experience.”
3. Lawanda Schettler’s Vision
At eleven thirty that Monday night, while the show-ups were still in progress, a woman named Lawanda Schettler called the Homicide Bureau and said she had something to tell about the Algiers shootings. An hour later Detectives Edward Hay and Robert Hislop visited Mrs. Schettler at her home, an apartment in a six-story building at 150 West Euclid, close to the Algiers.
“She stated,” the two men reported, “that shortly after midnight, early Wednesday morning, she parked her car in front of and across the street from the Manor House Motel. She started toward the side door of a house across the street from the Manor. She intended to get some beer at this house.
“As she was walking to the side door, she saw two (2) Negro men carrying shotguns or rifles, walk up the front steps of the Manor House. Two white girls were sitting on the front porch. They both got up and stepped aside, as if frightened. She heard the door open with a loud noise, as if kicked open, and then heard a loud voice saying, ‘Man, you held out on us.’ This statement was immediately followed by several shots from inside the Manor House.
“Lawanda Schettler ran to her car and went home.”
Here was a lead that the detectives could not but welcome. Coupled with the word “coagulated,” which soon appeared in the formal report of one of the state troopers—not in Fonger’s, as it happened, but in another man’s—Mrs. Schettler’s story led to hopes of establishing that Carl Cooper’s death had been a separate occurrence from the others; that he had been killed, half an hour or so before the “sniping incident” had begun, by black criminal confederates of his, avenging some sort of holdout, or settling a grudge.
Mrs. Schettler, a firm-figured white woman of forty years, who keeps a long-haired cat and sometimes goes barefoot, at home, with white polish on her toenails, likes Hamm’s beer, and it was this predilection, she told Ladd Neuman some time after these events, that made her a chance “witness” of the Algiers affair. With her husband Chuck, a lanky worker at Chrysler who wears his hair in a crew cut, and with several other residents of their building, she had been riot-watching that evening from the flat roof of the apartment house. The beer ran out. She was thirsty. “I decided to be a good Samaritan,” Mrs. Schettler told Neuman; she offered to go to a blind pig, about which she knew, on Virginia Park directly across from the Algiers, to replenish the supply. She descended to her car shortly after midnight, drove east on Euclid to Woodward and then south one block—passing, on Woodward, a National Guard (she thought) jeep with four men in it, which did not challenge her, even though this was long after the curfew hour—and into Virginia Park, where she pulled to the curb across the street from the annex. Turning the corner, she had looked at the porch of the annex and had seen there, she said, “two gals sitting on the step.” Sh
e had noticed them, she told Neuman, because there was “a bright outside light on and a record-player blasting.” She was an alert witness; she observed, even while driving, that one was a blonde, the other a brunette. She parked her car and got out, and as she walked to the door of the blind pig, she looked back and saw that another car had driven in behind her and had stopped in front of the annex. Two black men got out—“they were young, say twenty-three, twenty-five”; another exact observation, considering the distance and darkness. They approached the porch of the annex, carrying long guns tight against their hips, with the barrels aligned vertically with their legs, whether rifles or shotguns she could not say; but, she told Neuman, “I saw guns with barrels on them.” When she saw the guns she started back toward her car.
As the two men stepped up to the porch, the girls, Mrs. Schettler said, arose and ran to either side. “What stood out,” she told Neuman, “was—as I was getting to the car, walking—was that I have a daughter, you see, and if that was my daughter with all that paint and makeup, well. . . .” As she boarded her car, she heard “this door banged, sounded like it was kicked open,” then the holding-out line was shouted, two gun blasts followed, a man screamed, and “by the time I got to the end of the block I could hear a girl screaming.” On her return home, she did not tell her husband where she had been. “I was terrified, and I came back without any beer, damn it.”
Mrs. Schettler told Neuman that though she did not want to get involved, nevertheless her conscience bothered her, and she brooded for several days and lost sleep by night; finally, reading in the papers that policemen had been arrested, she consulted her priest and with his blessing called the detectives. (The only trouble with this part of the story is that the policemen had not been arrested when she called Homicide.) As she unfolded her tale to Neuman, with her husband kibitzing, she and he began dropping, with increasing frequency, first names of friends of theirs on the police force. Mr. Schettler, an avid fire-watcher and amateur crimefighter who claims to have broken up a couple of muggings, commented on a visit paid his wife by the FBI, following up on her information: “I’m sick and tired of these bleeding hearts talking about civil rights. What about the rights of decent citizens?”
