He Calls Me by Lightning

by S Jonathan Bass

  Someone, presumably Silmon, told officers that Washington was at a relative’s home in Adamsville. Within a few hours, seven carloads of policemen arrived in the black area of Adamsville and engaged in a sadistic house-to-house romp, kicking doors in along Oakwood Drive. Hattie Cross was behind her home milking a goat when officers stomped through her vegetable garden and demanded to know where Caliph Washington was hiding. When she failed to answer, a policeman struck her in the face. She screamed and fell in the dirt as the officer pulled his gun and shot the goat. Everywhere Washington went on his escape, police left a terrible imprint, marking everyone he crossed paths with and starting a countdown to when they would come to collect.

  Bessemer city police, miles from their jurisdiction but with the assistance of Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies, spread throughout the neighborhood. Next door to Cross, they kicked open the door at William “Burley” Merritt’s house, snatched him out of bed, dragged him behind his house, and beat him as his wife Ernestine looked on in horror. When the officers finished the beating, they slapped handcuffs on Burley, put him in the back of a patrol car with blood dripping from his nose and head, and took him to the Bessemer City Jail. Before they left the Merritt house, officers knocked Burley’s elderly mother, Elizabeth Eaton, in the head with a rifle butt, and she lay bleeding and unconscious on the floor. She later died from the head trauma.

  Jessie Kyser was in a house nearby when a pistol-wielding policeman kicked open the front door and entered. “Stop right there,” Officer J. E. McGee screamed, but Kyser dropped his coffee cup and bolted out the back door. In a flash, McGee grabbed Kyser by the collar and tackled him to the ground. Apparently the officer thought he had Caliph Washington in his clutches. Gunshots rang out, and Kyser lay mortally wounded. The Birmingham News reported that McGee’s gun “accidently discharged” when the suspect “grabbed the officer and they struggled in the garden.” Officers on the scene also suggested that Kyser “grabbed the officer’s gun and it went off.” No matter how it happened, Kyser was dead. At a hearing on July 15, the shooting death was ruled justifiable.

  According to witnesses, the officers continued terrorizing the residents for two and a half hours. This was war, and Bessemer police were on a search-and-destroy mission. When they were unable to locate Washington, they allegedly shot chickens, goats, and pigs in pens behind houses. They soon learned that they had missed Cross, Pearson, Graham, and Caliph Washington driving northwest in a green Studebaker by less than ten minutes. Law enforcement officials put out a three-state alert (Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee) for the fugitive and the other three men. Four of the dozen or so Bessemer officers in Adamsville began the trek down U.S. 78 to Mississippi: Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies Arvel Doss and Charlie Stamps (the duo’s primary assignment was to investigate “liquor violations”), the Bessemer city commissioner of public safety Herman Thompson, and Bessemer detective Lawton Grimes, Sr.

  LAWTON “STUD” GRIMES was Bessemer’s most colorful and feared lawman. He joined the force in 1940 after working a handful of industrial jobs and serving as a “special service agent” for a local firm—presumably an antiunion head buster for one of the iron and steel companies. Stocky, sweat-soaked, and tobacco-stained, Grimes looked, talked, and acted like the stereotypical southern lawman with a well-fed stomach and a flattop haircut that looked like fuzz from a pipe cleaner; when he talked, his hard-edged voice rattled like an old pickup truck riding along a gravel road. As a teenager at nearby Hueytown High School, he earned his nickname “Stud” as a fearless head-butting running back on the football team. His iron-fisted approach to law enforcement reinforced his nickname as hard-boiled as a 20-minute egg and his reputation for breeding bold-faced violence in Bessemer. He was a Klansman in one of the most active and violent chapters in the South. On one occasion, while wearing his robe and hooded mask, a photographer snapped a picture of Grimes at a Klan rally. When the photo appeared in a local paper, Grimes’s police officer’s uniform and identifiable potbelly showed from underneath his robe, much to the chagrin of his supervisors.

  A little after noon, sheriff’s deputies in Monroe County, Mississippi, pulled over Zack Graham’s southbound Studebaker and arrested the trio. Officers took Cross, Pearson, and Graham to Aberdeen for questioning, and either one, two, or all three told of their fishing expedition in Amory to help Washington catch a northwest-bound Greyhound bus. The next day, Bessemer police brought the three men to Bessemer and charged them with aiding an escaping felon—if convicted, they would face a $500 fine and a year in prison.

  Back in Amory, deputies stopped at the bus station and questioned Billy May, the ticket agent, who remembered selling the ticket to a nervous black man. May gave the lawmen a detailed description of Washington and the “number of the bus on which he left Amory.” Within minutes, county officials radioed the Mississippi Highway Patrol that a U.S. Army soldier, “a negro male named Caliph Washington, approximately 18 to 19 years old, was thought to be on a Greyhound bus that left Amory, Mississippi at 10:30 en route to Memphis.” They warned that the suspect would be toting a loaded .38 Special concealed in a brown paper sack.

  When Washington boarded the bus in Amory, the Greyhound was making its first stop in Mississippi after having left Atlanta around 6:15 a.m. It also stopped in Anniston and Birmingham, following the same U.S. 78 route that the Freedom Riders would travel almost four years later. The bus was less than half full, and only two blacks occupied seats in the segregated back rows. Washington chose a driver’s side window seat on the second to last row and placed the brown paper sack under the seat in front of him occupied by Furman Jones, a black uniformed army sergeant who was returning to Fort Hood, Texas, from his home in South Carolina.

  In just a few minutes, the bus left Amory heading north toward Tupelo. For the first time in days, Washington felt at ease. He chatted for a while with a young woman across the aisle and then leaned forward and asked Jones if he could sit with him. He agreed, and the two talked about army life and Caliph’s time overseas. A weary Furman Jones began his westward trek that day on the 12:55 a.m. Greyhound from Spartanburg to Atlanta, where he changed buses and began the ride through Alabama and into Mississippi. The bus made several stops along the route: Tupelo, New Albany, and Holly Springs.

  As the Greyhound traveled west from Holly Springs toward Memphis, Mississippi state troopers J. W. Warren and Pete Connell arrived at the town’s bus station looking for Washington. The counter clerk informed the pair that the bus pulled out just five minutes before. They jumped back into their patrol car and hurried down U.S. 78 in pursuit of the Greyhound. The bus traveled only 15 miles to Byhalia when the troopers caught up with it. Pronounced Bu-hell-ya, the hamlet was a wide place in the road that derived its name from a Chickasaw word meaning “great oaks.” Before the Civil War, Byhalia boasted a thriving population and was a center of plantation culture for northern Mississippi and southwestern Tennessee. By 1957, however, only a handful of people remained in the isolated and impoverished area. The town’s most noteworthy event was that some five years ahead, on July 6, 1962, the author William Faulkner would die from a heart attack while in Wright’s Sanitarium in Byhalia.

  When the troopers overtook the bus around 2 p.m., Trooper Warren recalled that the Greyhound was on the side of the road at a filling station just off U.S. 78. The driver was exiting the station and walking back toward the bus when the officers pulled up. “I told him we were looking for a Negro who had killed a policeman . . . in Alabama,” Warren recalled. But both Caliph Washington and Furman Jones remembered that the troopers chased the Greyhound down and made the bus driver pull over. Whatever the case, Warren walked up the three short steps to the interior of the bus and spotted Furman Jones and Caliph Washington sitting side by side near the back. Heads turned and eyes trained on the trooper as he silently strode down the aisle, his eyes focused on the two black men. He walked just beyond the seat with Jones and Washington, leaned over, and whispered in a forceful to
ne, “Both of you put your hands behind your head, get up, and get off this bus.” The pair complied. Caliph walked down the aisle first, with Jones and Trooper Warren close behind.

  With the suspects off the Greyhound, Warren turned around and climbed back inside to search for the brown paper sack. Trooper Connell ordered Washington and Jones to stand with their backs against the side of the bus. The lawman focused on Jones first, seeing the army uniform and knowing that the suspect was a soldier. “Show us some I.D., boy,” Connell barked at the nervous Jones. Jones handed the officer his military identification and explained that he was returning from leave in South Carolina to his base in Texas. Satisfied, the officers allowed him to return to his seat.

  Caliph Washington stood silently and tried not to look guilty. When Connell asked where he was from, Washington answered that he was from Amory, Mississippi, on his way to Chicago. When he explained to the officer that he had no identification, Connell spun him around and began patting him down. When Washington spread his legs, his wallet slipped from its hiding place in his boxer shorts, slid down his leg, out the bottom of his trousers, and onto the ground. The Mississippi trooper picked it up, opened it, and read the name Caliph Washington on the driver’s license. He climbed up the stairs to the bus and proclaimed to his partner, “We’ve got the right one,” just as Warren reached the front holding the brown paper sack.

  The state troopers exited the Greyhound and stood in front of Washington. Warren opened the bag and pulled out Cowboy Clark’s fully loaded, pearl-handled, nickel-plated pistol. The silver .38 shimmered in the light of the heartless Mississippi sun. Warren checked the serial number. “K239435,” he said out loud—a match. Also in the sack, he found a pair of pants, a shirt, and a piece of cake. They handcuffed Washington and placed him in the back of patrol car. The bus proceeded west to Memphis, where Shelby County sheriff’s deputies arrested Furman Jones and held him for questioning until 10 the next morning.

  Heading the opposite way, Connell drove east on U.S. 78, while Warren sat in the passenger seat talking over his left shoulder, trying to coax a statement out of Washington. Warren later told a newspaper reporter that the suspect at first admitted he had killed Clark, but Washington later denied it. It took over an hour to drive the fifty miles to the state trooper station in New Albany, Mississippi. There Arvel Doss, Charlie Stamps, Herman Thompson, and Stud Grimes were waiting.

  That Sunday in New Albany, Caliph Washington stood with Bessemer police detective Grimes in front of the state trooper station. Apparently Grimes knew Washington well, later claiming that the young man “was raised right in my back yard, almost.” Leaning against his unmarked Oldsmobile, Stud puffed on his ever-present pipe and peppered the suspect with questions. “Caliph, what happened?” he demanded. “How come you to shoot him?” He pulled the revolver out of the sack and asked, “Whose gun is this?”

  Within a few minutes, Grimes and Monroe County deputies transported Washington to the courthouse in New Albany. Washington appeared before a local judge and waived extradition to Alabama. With all the legalities and paperwork taken care of, deputies escorted the suspect from the courthouse and officially handed him over to Stud Grimes. The Bessemer detective placed the handcuffed Washington in the back of his unmarked Oldsmobile and drove east toward home, with Doss, Stamps, and Thompson following in a Jefferson County patrol car. At Jasper, Alabama, Grimes transferred Washington to Chief Barron and Chief Deputy Sheriff Morris’s black sedan for the final leg of the journey.

  AFTER NEARLY SEVENTY straight hours of nonstop police work, which left Silmon’s legs peppered with buckshot, an innocent man dead from a bullet and a woman from a blow to the head, and dozens more beaten and terrorized, the prime suspect would soon be behind bars. For Stud Grimes, the case had become an obsession. He was the first detective at the crime scene in the early morning hours of July 12 (having just completed a twelve-hour shift), participated in every stage of the head-cracking manhunt for Caliph Washington, and brought the suspect back to Bessemer late in the evening of July 14. Grimes’s son later recalled that his father worked eighty-four hours “without letting up.” A fireplug of a man, Stud lived for the manhunt and often found himself tangling with Bessemer’s roughest characters. During his years on the force, he received knife and gunshot wounds, including one shooting that left him paralyzed for a while, and numerous assaults. His hard-boiled reputation was known throughout Alabama. A fellow Bessemer policeman once bragged that Grimes killed more people in the line of duty than any other officer in the state’s history. Whether truth or legend, Stud Grimes was just as rough as the town he represented.

  It was after 9 p.m. when Caliph Washington arrived at the Jefferson County Courthouse in Bessemer. A least a dozen white lawmen milled about the area as George Barron and Clyde Morris escorted the handcuffed suspect through the loading area behind the courthouse and into a small freight elevator and up to the main floor for fifteen minutes of booking, fingerprinting, and mug-shot making. Deputies then took him to the Law Library on the third floor of the courthouse, just across the hall from the district attorney’s office, for questioning. The white interrogators, men associated with the Jefferson County sheriff’s office, were Clyde Morris, Clarence. E. “Dixie” Walker, James W. Thompson, Wilton H. Hogan, and Walter C. Dean. The five bitter-eyed lawmen gathered around a long wooden oak library table in the hot, airless room, thick with humidity and intimidation. Caliph Washington sat in an unforgiving stiff-backed chair and watched the eyes of those men staring at him, cold and hateful. Most said not a word. Lead investigator Walter Dean did most of the talking.

  “Caliph,” he began in a calm voice, “tell what happened in your own words.”

  The suspect was too tired to show hesitance or fear, so he talked, and Dean wrote down his answers in longhand. “I had him to tell me what happened,” Dean later recalled. “I asked him to start back at the beginning of the afternoon when he first got his daddy’s automobile and to tell me where all he had been and what he had done up to the time after the officer was shot.”

  Almost an hour later, they finished, and Dean placed the five-page written document before an exhausted, intimidated, and overwhelmed Washington. “Put your initials here, boy,” Dean said as he pointed to a spot on the paper. When Caliph scribbled “CW” on a page, Dean flipped to the next sheet and placed his index finger on the place for Washington to initial again. When he finished, Dean told him to print the phrase “I have read this statement and it is true,” and then sign his name. He complied, and Dean picked up the document. Dean, Morris, Walker, Thompson, and Hogan all signed the statement as witnesses.

  Dated July 14, 1957, at 10:20 p.m., the document began with the simple sentence: “My name is Caliph Washington.” The defendant explained that he was born November 14, 1939, and was seventeen years old. He claimed to be home on leave from the U.S. Army, although he already received an “other than honorable” discharge. While on “leave,” he was living with his mother and father in Bessemer. “I have not been mistreated in any way since I was arrested, nor promised any help or reward to make this statement, and I know it may be used in court at my trial for killing a policeman.” In his statement, Washington recounted how he borrowed his daddy’s 1950 two-tone sedan the previous Thursday evening and drove from Pipe Shop to Thompson Town to visit with friends in his old neighborhood. He then picked up Robert Shields and drove to Avenue T in Ensley to Birdie and Mary Robinson’s house. “We stayed there a little while,” he recalled, and then the group went to eat ice cream at the Dairy Frost. In less than half an hour, they returned to the girls’ house and stayed for a few minutes. “Then all four of us left there,” Caliph remembered, and drove to Lula Rice’s house at 2000 Exeter Avenue in Bessemer. “We sat around and talked.” They stayed for an hour until 10 p.m. On the way back to the girls’ home in Ensley, they stopped at the Blue Gardenia in Fairfield for sandwiches. They dropped the girls off, and Robert and Caliph returned to Travellick. “We sat in front of
his house and talked a while,” the suspect said. “I left Robert’s house, I think, about 12:30 in the morning and was on my way home.”

  Washington recalled that as he crossed Thirty-Third Street on the South Bessemer Road, a car came “out of the bushes” and started to follow him. “I was going about 40 miles an hour,” the statement read, “which was too fast.” The car followed about five or six blocks with no siren or red flashing light on top. “He shot at me two times,” Caliph recounted, “and I speeded up and he turned on the red blinker light.” By this time, Caliph was circling in the alleyways between Dartmouth, Exeter, and Fairfax avenues.

  I knew by this time it was a police car chasing me then I stopped in front of Bessie Mae Johnson’s house. Time I got out of my daddy’s car the policeman was standing by me. He had his gun in his hand. He said where is that whiskey. And I said I don’t have anything. He was pretty close to me and I started to jerk the pistol out of his hand and we fumbled around and the pistol went off two or three times and I layed the policeman on the front seat of his car. I got his pistol; there was some bullets on the seat. I got them. And then I run to Exeter Avenue and saw the police; then I got in the ditch and then got back on Exeter Avenue.

  Washington remembered knocking on the door of a house between Fairfax and Exeter: “Wouldn’t anybody come to the door.” He then ran to Elijah Honeycutt’s house on Brickyard Hill. “He come to the door, I told him I wanted him to take me off apiece. He ask me what I was doing up there that time of morning. He didn’t want to take me and I begged him to take me.” Honeycutt and his girlfriend drove Caliph Washington to Travellick, near Robert Shields’s house, where he hid in the woods the rest of the night. The next morning, he went to Robert’s house and his mother gave him a sandwich and he returned to the woods and stayed there until the next day. On Saturday, he returned to Robert’s house and asked his father “if he could take me off apiece” toward Highway 78 west.