The Ghosts of Mississippi

by Maryanne Vollers

  They had ordered sandwiches for lunch, and they sat at the little table by receptionist-secretary Jeanie Stewart’s desk and reviewed the morning, play by play. They chuckled over Beckwith’s admission that he had been to visit Parchman with “the wife of someone.”

  “I spent so much time trying to nail that down, putting him at that jail,” Crisco said. “And he gives it to us!”

  What Beckwith revealed on the stand that day set up the prosecution for the day his case would come to trial. Assuming there would ever be a trial.

  Beckwith seemed more in control of himself when he resumed his testimony after lunch. Peters kept trying to shake him. At one point the two men nearly ripped an exhibit — the photocopy of an old letter — in a childish tug-of-war right in front of the judge. Beckwith kept addressing Peters as if he were a buck private in boot camp: “Look at me when you talk to me!” he would say.

  By the end of the day Beckwith had proved to his lawyers that he was a very risky witness to put on the stand.

  In spite of Beckwith’s petulant performance observers felt that the defense team had made a strong case of prejudice against their client in their legal arguments. At the same time the defense had quietly scored a tangible victory in another state. Coxwell had filed an appeal to vacate Beckwith’s Louisiana dynamite-transport conviction. Since his release from prison, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that five-member juries were unconstitutional in such cases. Based on that ruling a Louisiana judge retroactively set aside Beckwith’s guilty verdict. He now had no criminal record, and the bomb incident could not be brought up at his murder trial. If there was one.

  It was only eight-thirty in the morning, and the August heat was already building in the concrete sidewalks along Tombigbee Street as DeLaughter ducked into the back of the courthouse. He was taking big strides, walking much too fast for someone who had grown up in Mississippi and ought to know better. He was dressed in one of his dark gray murder-trial suits, with shiny black brogues to match his overstuffed briefcase.

  He punched the elevator button in the cool courthouse basement.

  Crisco was already working in his roomy corner office. The case files for the week were neatly stacked on his desk. Crisco was hunched over the Selectric, pecking at the keys with his two crooked forefingers, typing up another sheaf of subpoenas.

  Crisco was already prepared for the murder case DeLaughter was suddenly scheduled to try that morning. When DeLaughter walked through the door, Crisco handed him the fact sheet and the witness list.

  “Just tell me — when did the murder happen and where?” DeLaughter asked his investigator. He hadn’t had time to get ready for the case.

  Crisco pointed to his sheet, and DeLaughter was scribbling the details down on a legal pad when Jeanie Stewart came quietly to the door.

  “Bobby, there are reporters and a news crew waiting for you. They want to talk to you,” she said.

  Crisco looked at DeLaughter’s face — is there something else I need to know? — but DeLaughter was still concentrating on copying the fact sheet as he said, “Okay, tell ’em I’ll be right out.”

  Both men knew that Judge Hilburn was going to make his decision on the Beckwith case today. It was the unspoken tension behind every move anybody made. You could feel it in the way Jeanie tiptoed around, her southern-breeze voice even breathier than usual; the way Bobby tightened up when he was worried, closed up his face so even his mother wouldn’t know what he was thinking. Beckwith seemed to follow him today like a dark shadow.

  Crisco leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his stomach. He was going to have to see a doctor about this pain in his gut.

  When Crisco was working homicide, he used to carry a pack of Rolaids in his pants pocket wherever he went. Always had a roll. He used to eat them by the handful. He ate his last Rolaid the day he took this job nearly two years ago. Not that working in the D.A.’s office didn’t have its own brand of stress. There were literally hundreds of violent felonies to try every court term and only two judges and two prosecutors to handle them. Doc Thaggard had suffered from ulcers for years. Cynthia Hewes had them. DeLaughter seemed to be the only one in the office with an iron stomach. He would joke that all he ever got was a bad attitude. Give him time. Crisco could feel the twinges of a return performance of his own bad stomach.

  The Beckwith case had been with him as long as this job. Now two years of work could crash and burn with one ruling if Breland Hilburn decided that Beckwith’s constitutional rights had been violated.

  The whole city seemed on edge this week. People had been calling all morning: Have you heard anything? Are they gonna let him go? A rumor was percolating through the white community that the blacks would riot if Beckwith was set loose. Someone called to see whether she should cancel her evening yoga class.

  Only a few months ago the city of Los Angeles had gone up in flames because of an unpopular court case. Nobody was forgetting Rodney King in this part of town. The Board of Supervisors had already approved $31,315 to buy riot gear and gas masks for the sheriff’s department. The Jackson Police Department had taken the old Thompson Tank out of mothballs, tuned it up, and painted its armor with shiny black lacquer. The SWAT team had nicknamed the personnel carrier “Darth Vader,” it looked so wicked. Even the young cops knew that the tank had made its first public appearance in 1964, the week of Beckwith’s first mistrial.

  Crisco drained his mug of decaf, then reached in his drawer for the bottle of Riopan. As he turned back to his typing, Cynthia Hewes poked her head in the door. “Hear anything?” she asked.

  Crisco shook his head.

  Hewes, who was getting ready to try a rape case, wore her own version of the serious-felony suit: a slim black dress-and-jacket combination and drop-dead black heels. She spotted the Riopan on Crisco’s desk.

  “I swear, Crisco,” she said. “We ought to set out a candy dish full of Tagamet for the office.”

  Crisco laughed. “It’d help if they’d just get this trial over with,” he said.

  Hewes had heard the rumors about the impending riot, just like everyone else. She blamed it on the media, particularly the Clarion-Ledger, which had been running helpful headlines such as “State NAACP Chief Calls for Calm If Beckwith Acquitted.”

  “Now there’s a thought!” Hewes said, chuckling. “It’s like, WHATEVER you do, DON’T think of an elephant!”

  Late that afternoon, without fanfare. Judge Hilburn issued a written statement denying the defense motion to dismiss the charges against Beckwith. Hilburn allowed the defense to appeal his decision to the state supreme court but refused to delay proceedings while awaiting the outcome of the appeal. He set a new trial date for September 21.

  At the same time Hilburn announced that the trial would be moved from Jackson to Hernando, Mississippi. Two weeks earlier the judge had presided over an eight-hour hearing to decide Beckwith’s request for a change of venue. The defense showed how obsessive local media coverage of the Beckwith story had become: 188 broadcasts on WLBT alone; 150 stories in the Clarion-Ledger. Coxwell and Kitchens had then paraded witness after witness, including three private investigators who had, rather unscientifically, polled the county, asking whether they thought Beckwith could get a fair trial in Jackson. Their conclusion, naturally, was that he could not.

  The district attorney wanted the trial to be held in Jackson. The judge, in an unprecedented move, ruled that the jury would be selected from Panola County, in north-central Mississippi. Of the county’s thirty thousand residents, 48 percent were black — close enough to the Hinds County ratio to satisfy the judge. Once the jury was chosen in Panola, it would be moved to Hernando, the seat of neighboring DeSoto County, where the trial would be held. It was a confusing arrangement, and, as it turned out, only the judge was satisfied.

  Coxwell and Kitchens were howling before the ink dried on the decision. “We think it’s grossly unfair to Mr. Beckwith,” Kitchens told the Clarion-Ledger, which, as usual, gave the story fro
nt-page coverage. “I can’t imagine a situation where you are carting jurors around from one county to another that doesn’t heighten the seriousness or the heinousness of the case.” Kitchens, incidentally, wanted the trial held on the Gulf Coast, where most people were white.

  The fathers of Hernando bayed even louder than Beckwith’s defense team once the news had sunk in. It soon occurred to them that Hinds County was about to deliver them a huge, steaming gift-wrapped package of horse manure disguised as a celebrated murder trial.

  It was only a coincidence that at that moment the best-selling paperback in America was John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, set in a town very much like Hernando, where Grisham used to practice law. The novel centers on a racially freighted murder trial that sparks a series of bombings, fatal beatings, Klan demonstrations, and race riots in the picturesque town square.

  To seal the deal, squads of Jackson television crews and print journalists descended on Panola and DeSoto Counties, shoving microphones in the faces of shoppers at the feed store, asking if they were worried about a riot.

  Quietly the city attorney for Hernando began exploring ways to worm out of the agreement the county had made with Judge Hilburn. Within a month he would have the courthouse declared a fire hazard in a desperate move to push the trial out of town.

  As it turned out, Beckwith himself handed DeLaughter the opportunity to try the case on home turf. On the weekend after Judge Hilburn’s decision mysterious packages appeared in the driveways of houses in white neighborhoods in Panola and DeSoto Counties. Each contained a signed letter on Beckwith’s stationery and a small fifty-page booklet produced by the Liberty Lobby titled Citizens Rule Book.

  In the letter Beckwith described himself as a “political prisoner presently being held … on the politically motivated charge of the 1963 assassination of the Mississippi NAACP president [sic] for that period, of which I am innocent.”

  A note in Beckwith’s hand in each booklet directed the reader to the chapter titled “A Handbook for Jurors.” Basically it was an instruction manual on how to hang up a jury with one vote. It pointed out that a juror is not obliged to follow the written law if he doesn’t like it: “If you feel the statute involved in a criminal case being tried by you is unfair, you must affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all.”

  DeLaughter immediately filed a motion to return the trial to Jackson, since Beckwith had attempted to poison the jury pool in the new venue. The judge did not change his ruling.

  DeLaughter concentrated on his pending felony cases for the rest of the term. He rarely came out of his office, rarely had lunch with the staff. He seemed lost in himself, brooding, while everyone else was buoyant, optimistic that there might be an end to this saga after all.

  When DeLaughter went into a dark mood, nobody could crack it. Not even Hewes, who left a note on his sloppy desk one day, telling him a mutual friend of theirs had been interviewed by a national newspaper for an article profiling DeLaughter. “She told them you were boring and had no hobbies!” Cynthia wrote. No response. Everyone gave him a wide berth after that.

  Crisco spent his days on the phone, arranging logistics for the trial in Hernando, trying to track down all the witnesses. There were more than sixty names. Some of them had moved; some had left no forwarding address. A couple of the old Jackson policemen had suffered heart attacks since the case had been reopened. Crisco tried to talk personally to everybody, to reassure them and give them an update on how the case was going. Some of the witnesses, particularly Delmar Dennis, were blowing hot and cold. Will they testify or won’t they? Sometimes Crisco felt like a cowboy with a nervous herd and storm clouds on the horizon.

  Meanwhile DeLaughter dealt with the state supreme court appeal, which should have been the last legal hurdle to the trial. Beckwith’s lawyers submitted a forty-nine-page brief, citing eighty-nine cases to support their arguments that Beckwith was being denied his rights to due process and a speedy trial. DeLaughter filed his response on Friday, August 21. After that all anyone could do was wait.

  That weekend the first storm of hurricane season plowed into Miami. Hurricane Andrew flattened southern Florida in a few crazy hours, then headed out into the Gulf of Mexico. By Monday morning the big, heaving monster storm was sucking in humid air from all directions, gaining strength by the hour, and churning north, heading straight for the Mississippi coast. The last time a storm of that size had hit the Gulf Coast was 1969 and hurricanes were still named for women. Camille had killed hundreds, most of them people who had ignored the weather reports.

  By Monday afternoon the radio stations in Jackson were playing disaster sets: “Bad Moon Rising,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” A steady stream of refugees was trailing up 1-55 from New Orleans and Biloxi.

  That night Crisco turned on the ten o’clock news to hear the latest on Andrew, and that’s how he learned that the Mississippi Supreme Court had stayed all circuit court proceedings in the Beckwith case. The justices wanted new written arguments submitted, and they wanted to hear oral arguments on October 15,1992. So much for the trial schedule, and all the witness arrangements, and all the plane tickets and hotel reservations and bodyguards lined up and all the rest of it. All Crisco could do was laugh at the television set because he didn’t feel like crying.

  The next morning Crisco wasn’t laughing anymore. In fact he was walking around the district attorney’s office like a man in a daze, wondering who to call first. Nancy Lee noticed him walking across the short hall between the coffee machine and the reception desk with a full mug of coffee, lost in thought and sloshing big spills all across the floor.

  “Charlie! You’re spilling your coffee,” she said as she ran to mop it up for him. Normally she wouldn’t have done that; she would have made him go get a rag, scolding him like a child. He would have wiped it up, laughing, and this would have been one of the small jokes of the day; Crisco spilled his coffee. But today he seemed so forlorn and distracted that nobody even wanted to tease him.

  “I am not a happy camper,” he said in his flat cop voice as Nancy Lee handed him another cup of decaf.

  Then the elevator doors parted, and out stepped DeLaughter. It was one of those suspended moments — the pause after the sheriff walks into the saloon — as everybody turned to read DeLaughter’s expression.

  This was the two-week break between court terms, so DeLaughter was wearing his civvies; Dockers khakis, brown deck shoes, a green polo shirt. His eyes looked strained with fatigue, but they revealed a wicked amusement.

  “Can you believe it!” he shouted at Crisco in his big courtroom voice. “It’s crazy! There’s no logic to it!”

  DeLaughter grabbed his pink message slips, and the two men walked down the hall. DeLaughter was pouring it out, like a dam bursting. He was saying that dismissing the case would have been one thing — that would have made him mad, but at least it would have been over. This was just crazy, having to resubmit the arguments he’d already submitted, going through this schedule that forced them to put the trial off yet again, when both sides were ready to make their oral arguments today if they had to!

  He was still railing about it an hour later, throwing pieces of paper around his office, trying to clear a work space.

  “Meanwhile we delay this thing and the witnesses are fading. Dying!”

  He tossed a pink message slip into a file drawer. “Look at this — Betty Jean Coley died! We found that out this week.”

  This had gone on too long. The case had already lasted one full term in the D.A.’s office.

  “A whole career,” DeLaughter said, shaking his head.

  He flopped back in his chair and stared at the fresh stack of papers on his desk, his share of the 930-something cases coming up next term. He and Hewes were expected to try or settle every violent felony in Hinds and Yazoo Counties. His whole load had been cleared for Beckwith, and now all this work had come back at him and Crisco. All these other cases neede
d to be scheduled for September.

  “If it wasn’t for all this work,” he said, half serious, “I’d just go to the beach and get drunk!”

  Someone pointed out that the beach might not be there tomorrow, and he laughed harder.

  “Right! There’s that storm coming! The beach won’t be there!”

  It seemed as if everything in DeLaughter’s world was spinning out of control, like he was caught up in a whirlwind of bad omens. The only thing to do was to have lunch.

  Hewes, Crisco, and Doc Thaggard appeared in Bobby’s doorway.

  “Where do we eat?” said Hewes.

  “How about across the street?”

  They gathered DeLaughter up in a tight little scrum of friends, closing ranks around each other as they always did in times of crisis, and walked him to the restaurant. They were raucous and loose as mourners at an Irish wake. It was the kind of nerve-charged laughter you might hear after a battle, or before a hurricane.

  Outside the atmosphere itself felt different, as if all the air had been replaced with something unfamiliar. There was a tropical mildness to it, and a tension, like something was coming in on an invisible, evil wind — felt but not seen. The sky was bright turquoise, with two layers of clouds in it. There were thick, dark swaths in the stratosphere; wispy low clouds, like puffs of gray smoke, skimmed just overhead, as quick as Learjets.

  As DeLaughter crossed Pascagoula Street, he glanced hard over his shoulder at the blank face of the county jail. Beckwith was in his basement cell, just a few yards away. He turned to Crisco, who was walking next to him.

  “Well, even if this case gets dismissed,” he said, “I can say one thing. That mean old son of a bitch spent more time in jail this time around, just waiting for his trial, than he did for the last two trials combined.”