The Man from the Train

by Bill James

  Reed claimed that by leaving the Before Day Club in the middle of the Hodges family murders he had saved the lives of three other white families who had been targeted for murder that same night, and that he himself was now a target of the club because he had broken ranks. In Bulloch County a man was shot and killed because he was misidentified as Handy Bell, one of the named members of the BDC.

  Reprisal groups formed in response to the Before Day Clubs. The Before Day Clubs almost certainly never existed anywhere except in Paul Reed’s imagination, but the reprisal clubs were very real. In Register, Georgia (about ten miles south of the scene of the murders), two black men were ambushed and shot. In Portal, Georgia (seven miles west of the murders), a black man was shot, and his wife whipped. According to Moseley and Brogdon’s “A Lynching at Statesboro,” “numerous other beatings and attacks on Blacks occurred. The Statesboro News defended these attacks.” Violence against people of color reached a level such that substantial numbers of black families fled the area. As farmers and turpentine mill owners began to find themselves short of black workers, they began an effort to calm the situation. The Statesboro News admitted that the Before Day Clubs had never existed.

  Reed and Cato were convicted of the murders of the Hodges family after brief trials and jury deliberations that could have been measured in seconds. After the trials Hodges’s brother, a minister from Texas, did what he could to prevent the lynching, exhorting the lynch mob at several points to stand back and allow the system of justice to run its course. Claudia Hodges’s mother, on the other hand, urged the mob to burn them alive. There is a great deal of information available about the sequence of events leading up to the capture of the victims by the mob, the efforts to protect them from the mob, the decisions made by the mob, etc., but it is a ghastly and pathetic story and in large part parallels another event that I will tell you about later in the book, so I’m going to give that story the back of my hand at this time. This is not a book about lynching or racial violence; the murder of the Hodges family is much more relevant to our subject.

  When I told you the story of the crime at the start of the chapter, I told it to you as if these murders were a part of our series, ignoring the evidence that led to the convictions of Reed and Cato. But if you read other modern accounts of the crime, they tend to leave no doubt that the murdered men were the murderers of the Hodges family.

  The best account of the crime is a fourteen-page article by Charlton Moseley and Frederick Brogdon, published in the Georgia Historical Quarterly in the summer of 1981. The article is scholarly in nature, documented with footnotes, and extremely well written. All other modern accounts of the crime are based on the information provided by Moseley and Brogdon. Although they don’t directly say so, Moseley and Brogdon accept that Reed and Cato murdered the Hodges family and present the story of the murders as if this were clearly true. With the permission of the authors, I am going to reprint here selections from their article, with the goal of helping you to understand that point of view:

  Had the catastrophe been an act of God and nature?

  As the small cluster of men pondered the awful scene they began to suspect that more, much more, was involved. Woodcock and Woodrum, the first men at the scene, had noticed even in their excitement a shadeless kerosene lamp burning on the gatepost of the Hodges home, a flickering witness to whatever horrors had occurred there. As some of the men began to draw water from the well to cool the embers around the bodies, others examined the yard and began to discover disquieting evidence of a violent crime. Down the road they discovered the hat of Henry Hodges and near it, towards the cane patch, pronounced scuffling marks in the dirt. Most frightening of all they found several puddles of clotted blood. Then, in the still bright light of the dying fire someone discovered the bare footprints of a man and bloody hand smears on the fence.

  Next day, Friday morning, 29 July, a large crowd of people gathered in the road at the Hodges farm. Two bleak chimneys stood like sentinels in the yard, cold black ashes at their feet. On the gatepost the lamp still sat, its fuel exhausted and its flame extinguished. . . . At daylight on Friday following the murders, neighbors had investigated the scene of the crime. Scouring the area, they had turned up vital clues. Tracks of four strange men were found around the farm, one of them barefoot and three of them wearing shoes. The neighbors brought dogs to the scene and put them on the trail. The tracks led to Fishtrap Bridge on Lott’s Creek where a large group of picnicking Negroes destroyed the spoor. In the woods near the burned home searchers discovered a pair of shoes near a log. The shoes were mismatched, one a brogan and the other an elastic dress shoe. Tar coated the heel of one of the shoes and in the tar were several strands of hair, believed to have been from the head of Claudia Hodges. A farmer identified the shoes as mates to two pairs of shoes which he had bought for a Negro tenant living on his farm, one Paul Reed. In the road near the spot where the shoes were found another neighbor discovered a knife. The knife was also identified as belonging to Paul Reed. Hence the self-constituted posse had its first suspect.

  Interrupting for the sake of clarity, the shoes and the knife were not found on the Hodges property; even the hat and the “marks of a scuffle” may not have been found on the Hodges property. The hat and the marks of a scuffle were found outside the gatepost where the lamp was, and on down the road a little bit. The shoes and the knife were found after the search was extended beyond that. The observation that the hair was “believed to have been from the head of Claudia Hodges” seems instructive about the mind-set of the investigators, since there is no possible way that anyone could have known where that hair came from, or could even have made any educated guess, other than to assume that it came from one of the five victims. Also instructive as to the mind-set of the investigators is the term “the tracks of four strange men.” Really? How do we know that these are “strange” men? How do we know that they are not merely the footprints of neighbors or sharecroppers, passing by in the most ordinary way?

  I’m also not sure why Moseley and Brogdon believe that these shoes were “bought for” Paul Reed. The newspapers that I have seen say these shoes were given to Paul Reed, which I interpret to mean that they were given to him after they had been worn by their original owners. Anyway:

  On Saturday morning a number of the men went to Paul Reed’s home and searched it. In the house they discovered a shoe that matched one of those found near the Hodges’s home and under the house another that matched the other shoe found at the murder site. The posse also found a bolt of calico and a calico dress that matched the shoe strings found in the shoes. Besides this the men discovered what they believed was blood in the hip pocket of a pair of Reed’s trousers. Reed denied involvement in the crime though he readily admitted that the shoes were his. He claimed that the blood stains in the pocket of his pants had come from a partridge which he had killed and placed there. . . . The story that Harriet Reed told damned her husband and their neighbor Will Cato. Will Cato and her husband, said Harriet, believed Henry Hodges to have $300 in coin buried in a kettle behind the chicken coop at the Hodges home. On Saturday night before the murders Reed and Cato had gone to the Hodges home to dig for the money but were discovered and to cover their intentions told Hodges that they had been on their way to a crossroads store to buy banjo strings when Cato had been grazed on the leg by a snake. They asked Hodges, said Harriet, for turpentine to put on the wound. Then, the following Thursday night, Cato and Reed had gone back to the Hodges home determined to get the money or kill the family. Once again Cato and Reed were discovered, said Harriet, and this time a struggle resulted which led to the murder of Hodges and then his wife when she came to her husband’s aid. Frightened by their deed, Reed and Cato dragged the bodies of Henry and Claudia into the house. Terrified, they left the scene but upon reflection decided to return and burn the house to destroy the evidence of their crime. Accordingly, approximately an hour later, they returned and while searching the premises for money discovered
the oldest child, nine-year-old Kitty Corinne, hidden behind a trunk. Harriet now told a story which became the most often repeated legend of the entire episode. Little Kitty, said Mrs. Reed, offered Will Cato and Paul a nickel to spare her life but they callously bashed in her skull with a lamp base. The two smaller children, Harmon and Talmadge, were left alive to die in the flames. Pouring kerosene from the lamps Cato and Reed put the house to the torch.

  Paul Reed may not have been an exemplary citizen, and this may be why he was suspected of the crime. For what it is worth, I do believe that Paul Reed and various friends may have talked among themselves, at some point or on several occasions, about the possibility of robbing the Hodges family—not murdering them and burning down their house, but just about stealing some money rumored to be buried on their property. I believe that this may have happened because Will Cato, during his trial, admitted that he had witnessed these conversations, although he denied everything else that he had been charged with, and he insisted that he told Reed and his friends not to do it. And second, if there had been such conversations, that would explain why Harriet Reed turned on her husband so quickly after she was arrested: when she was told that the Hodgeses had been robbed and murdered, she actually thought that he might have done it (although in fact the Hodges family had not been robbed).

  Let’s talk about the knife (which is described in some modern reports as a “bloody” knife, although I have not seen any contemporary newspaper which says there was blood on the knife, and Moseley and Brogdon do not say that there was blood on the knife). In its first report on the case, July 30, the Washington Post stated that “the skulls of Hodges, his wife, and one child had been broken, apparently with an axe.” Almost all first reports of the crime state that the three oldest victims had their skulls crushed by an axe and the two youngest perished in the fire, and the Washington Post in their last article about the crime, after the murders of Reed and Cato, still reports specifically and at some length that the Hodgeses were murdered with an axe.

  Well, what is the relevance of a knife to an axe murder? Who was the knife used to kill? Moseley and Brogdon avoid this problem by never mentioning an axe in their account. They never say that it wasn’t an axe murder; they just ignore the reports which state specifically that it was—and for good reason. Either you follow the theory of the axe in this case, or you follow the theory of the knife; it isn’t both. If we follow the theory of the knife, then the murders were committed by Paul Reed and others chosen from the long list of those that Reed accused. If we follow the theory of the axe, then the crime was more probably committed by The Man from the Train. If we follow the theory of the knife, it was a robbery; if we follow the theory of the axe, it was not a robbery. The question is, Which theory, taken as a whole, is more credible?

  * * *

  Backing off for a second, do you know the difference between a kerosene lamp and a kerosene lantern? Some of you who are younger will not catch the distinction, so I had better explain. The lamps used at this time were almost always made of glass, and ordinarily were never taken out of the house. A lantern was sturdier, made of metal with glass panes, and was built for outdoor use. A lamp was designed to sit on a flat surface, whereas a lantern was usually designed to be held or suspended from above; it often had a “point” on the bottom so that it could not stand upright on a flat surface.

  When I first saw reports of this case talking about a lamp on the gate post, I assumed that they meant a lantern hanging from the gatepost, which would be not uncommon—but no; they meant a lamp, and we know they meant a lamp because they talk about a lamp without its shade (what was called a “chimney” in the North, a “shade” in the South). That’s a part of a lamp; it’s not a part of a lantern. Now let’s look at this paragraph from the Atlanta Constitution, August 1, 1904:

  Evidence has developed that tends to show a still more heinous crime was committed upon the persons of Mrs. Hodges and her 9-year-old daughter, Kittie, before they were killed. That robbery was not the prime motive of the crime is shown by the finding of a purse containing several dollars near where the body of Mrs. Hodges was discovered. The theory that now has most adherents is that Mr. Hodges was first attacked and killed at the stable. Then little Kittie was assaulted. Her screams attracted her mother, who ran out with a lighted lamp, which she set down upon a gate post. When Mrs. Hodges ran to the aid of her daughter, the theory is, she was knocked down and outraged and then killed. Then all of the bodies, living and dead, were dragged into the house and the torch was applied. This theory fits in with the confession of the wife of one of the accused men.

  Well, no, actually, it doesn’t; we just quoted the summary of that confession, and in Mrs. Reed’s account, robbery was the entire motive for the crime, no one was raped, Kitty was killed long after her parents, and she was killed inside the house, not in the yard. It doesn’t actually fit at all.

  This failed reconstruction of the crime scene is driven by the questions “Why is that lamp out here on the gatepost?” and “Why doesn’t it have its shade?” A man would never carry a kerosene lamp out to the stable to do his chores; he would carry a lantern—but a woman might grab a lamp, perhaps, to rush hurriedly into the yard in an emergency (apologizing for the sexist role assignments, but farm people a hundred years ago had strongly defined gender roles). Those speculating about the crime thus designed a scenario around the assumption that Mrs. Hodges must have rushed hurriedly into the yard, carrying the lamp. In other places, they would speculate that the heat from the burning house must have shattered the shade from the lamp.

  But there are two huge problems with that scenario. First, it assumes that Mrs. Hodges carried the lamp to the yard in a desperate situation, responding to the screams of her daughter or perhaps searching for her missing husband, but that she somehow had the opportunity, what we might call the leisure, to set the lamp carefully on the gatepost before she herself was attacked. It is difficult to visualize how that happens. Run scenarios in your head, and you will see that within a few moments she is either attacked without warning or she finds a bloody body. In neither of those events is she likely to have the opportunity to carefully place the lamp on the gatepost. Why would she set the lamp on the gatepost before she was either (1) attacked, or (2) found something? And if she found something, why would she then go put the lamp on the gatepost? It doesn’t make sense.

  This scenario also speculates that three victims were killed outside the house, and their bodies were dragged inside the house before it was set on fire. But it had rained heavily on the afternoon and evening of the Hodges family murders; neighbors initially assumed that the house must have been struck by lightning, starting the fire. If three victims had been killed outside the house and their dead bodies dragged back into the house, there should have been obvious drag marks in the muddy ground, intermingled with deep footprints. If the victims had been either hit in the head with an axe or stabbed to death with a knife, there would have been blood trails along with the drag marks, making them yet more obvious.

  This scenario assumes that the first on-scene investigators, the neighbors, found the “marks of a scuffle” some distance from the house and four sets of footprints in the lane outside the house, but that they failed to notice three sets of bloody drag marks with deep footprints in the soft ground leading into the house.

  Dragging around dead bodies is hard work; I’ve never actually dragged a dead body, but I am told that it is damned hard work—and why? It’s an isolated farm and they’re dead and it is nighttime and you’re not going to stay around here anyway, why on earth would you drag the bodies back into the house?

  What those attempting to reconstruct the crime scene did not know, could not possibly have known, was that there was a serial murderer traveling the eastern seaboard, murdering families with an axe in circumstances much like this, and that that serial murderer very often sexually assaulted prepubescent females as a part of his crime. And that a peculiar signature of that serial murd
erer was that he often left a lamp, without its chimney, burning at the scene of the crime.

  Moseley and Brogdon, while recounting the story of the robbery at some length, treat the allegation of rape as if this were thrown against the wall to enflame the public’s emotional reaction:

  On Monday the Savannah Morning News and the Augusta Chronicle printed stories that were not calculated to cool inflamed spirits. Basing their evidence on the discovery of a melted gold ring and several coins near Claudia Hodges’s body, the News and the Chronicle discounted robbery as the motive for the killings and openly stated that the “flames concealed a darker crime” and that a “nameless offense” had been committed before the torch was applied. The Savannah and Augusta papers strongly intimated that both Claudia and Kitty Hodges had been sexually assaulted either before or after they were murdered.

  Well, no, they didn’t “strongly intimate” that this might have happened; they stated directly that this had happened, although, in keeping with the journalistic practices of the day, they did not use the words rape or sexual assault. What is reported as several dollars in all contemporary newspapers has become several coins in this article, diminishing its significance. Moseley and Brogdon are writing more about the lynching than they are about the murders; to them, the critical import of this information is the role that it plays in further enflaming the passions of a public that was already in a murderous mood. But the critical information here is not merely that there was a rape; it is also that there was no robbery. The Man from the Train, in dozens of cases, left jewelry and money in plain sight untouched at the scene of the crime. Persons committing a robbery do not normally do this. Moseley and Brogdon acknowledge that “much of the confession of Harriet Reed was contradictory and if the killers obtained any money, as she claimed, it was never discovered in the investigation nor could she account for it.” This was not a robbery.