by Alex Heard
The guard detail arrived in three army trucks, “a reconnaissance car,” and a heavily armed jeep. The troopers were equipped with bayoneted rifles, machine guns, and tear gas. Outside the courthouse, men were arrayed at the entrances and on the lawn. Inside the big courtroom, which was kept breezy with help from windows and balconies on the south and north sides, deputies searched spectators for firearms before letting them in. The first three rows of benches were cleared to create a buffer between the people and the prisoner.
McGee’s lawyers were court-appointed locals, M. W. Boyd and Harry Koch, who didn’t want anything to do with the case and who weren’t experienced criminal defenders. The presiding judge was F. Burkitt Collins, a member of a pioneering Jones County family who had served as a combat infantryman in France during World War I. Collins started practicing law in 1915 in Ellisville—along with Laurel, the second of Jones County’s two county seats—and he was elected to the circuit-court bench for the first time in 1940. He was middle-aged when the McGee case started, a gray-haired, thin-lipped man with sharp features and a reputation for being, as the Leader-Call once put it, “quiet, studious, and unassuming, possessed of that rare quality known as judicial temperament.”
Everybody knew the McGee case was combustible—the Leader-Call labeled it “the strongest charge” of Collins’s career—and that first morning, speaking to prospective jurymen, the judge gave a speech that was intended not just for the townspeople in the room, but for anybody outside who might be harboring creatively violent ideas.
“The great war is over and our country is saved,” he said. “It is a country of law, governed by law, a law under which all are considered equal. We need bow to none. The only majesty we recognize is ‘His Majesty, the Law.’”
Soon enough, he got to the point: The trial and punishment were the exclusive business of him, the lawyers, and the jury. Spectators and other interested parties were not to interfere. “We are called today to see that the law is properly administered, to see that those who have transgressed are brought to justice,” he said. “We cannot do this by taking the law into our own hands, and running over the law. We must follow the law in every particular. We must do this, whether it suits us or not….”
Calling any case “the strongest charge” of Collins’s career was saying something, since he had been involved in two of the most famous courtroom spectacles in Laurel history. He served as a defense attorney in the first of them, the sensational 1935 trial of a local woman named Ouida Keeton, a thirty-three-year-old who was accused of murdering her mother, Daisy Keeton—killing her inside the home they shared and then chopping her up and dumping the parts in the woods.
Some of the parts, that is. People called it “the legs murder” because the only remains ever found were a pair of hefty female hips and two thighs. The legs turned up on January 21, 1935, wrapped in old sugar sacks. They were spotted by a black tenant farmer named Don Evans Jr., who was out hunting rabbits in the woods of Jasper County, about fourteen miles north of Laurel. Evans was terrified that he’d be blamed—and lynched—but later that day he told a white man what happened, and together they flagged down a motorist who notified the police.
Policeman Wayne Valentine, a central figure in the McGee case, helped solve the mystery and later co-wrote a true-crime article about it called “Unraveling the Ouida Keeton ‘Legs’ Murder.” Step one was identifying the remains; all the medical examiner could say was that the victim was probably over thirty-five, probably weighed around 155 pounds, had given birth, and appeared to be “a woman of refinement.”
The first break came on the 24th, when a farmer north of town reported having seen a “highly excited woman” in a red car coming up his farmhouse lane before turning around. He recalled seeing a “large bundle” in the car. Newspaper coverage brought forth another witness, a wreckerman who’d been called to pull a red Willys-Knight sedan out of the mud on the morning of the 21st. He told police it belonged to Ouida Keeton.
Questioned at home, Ouida said her mother was in New Orleans. Police Chief J. E. Brown arrested her after spotting blood on a fender of the car. Valentine found bloodstains on the floor in front of the hearth, which had been vigorously scrubbed, along with a stained iron poker and cleaving instruments in the kitchen.
Pressed, Ouida offered a preposterous story, saying her mother had been kidnapped while they were driving together in the country. Eventually she confessed, shocking the town by naming an accomplice: W. M. Carter, a prominent sixty-seven-year-old Laurel businessman with whom Ouida was having an out-of-wedlock romance. Ouida said Carter killed Daisy because Daisy objected to their relationship. He ordered her to dispose of the legs while he took care of the upper half.
Carter was brought in and questioned (he denied everything), arrested, and taken to Jackson, because there was concern that even he, a white man, might get lynched thanks to the barbarity of the crime. They were tried separately. Ouida, represented by Collins, pleaded insanity, and she came to court every day in a wheelchair, presenting the image of a swooning invalid who had lost her mind. But the evidence was overwhelming and included an extremely graphic exhibit: the legs themselves, which were displayed to the jury inside a small, gray-painted box with a glass cover.
Before the jury went out, Collins delivered an eloquent speech that pinned the blame on Carter and asked for mercy for the second person whose life he had destroyed: Ouida. Carter, he said, had killed Daisy with a poker and then forced Ouida to be his accomplice. Ouida was like a “mighty oak that stands in the forest, unshakened and unmoved,” while Carter was a malevolent wind that roared in to knock her down. “She saw this dominating mind take this poker and destroy the life of the best friend she ever had,” he said. “Why wouldn’t it destroy her mind?”
The jury didn’t go for it. Ouida was found guilty and sentenced to life at the state prison at Parchman. She was later transferred to the state mental hospital, where she lived out her days. Carter was tried twice but he got off, one reason being that the portion of the body he was responsible for never turned up. Forever after, many people believed he dumped Daisy’s torso in the Gulf of Mexico.
Over time, Ouida Keeton became Laurel’s version of Lizzie Borden: ghastly but quaint. Eudora Welty, a connoisseur of Mississippi murder stories, loved to titillate friends with the bloody details. Even now, the case is still a guilty pleasure in Jones County. If you’re ever in the courthouse, and you ask politely, the women there might show you a tucked-away folder that contains photographs of Daisy’s legs, along with an original copy of Ouida’s mail-order course in butchering.
However, there never was, and never will be, any nostalgia attached to another famous case Collins played a part in, this time as the judge: the October 1942 lynching of a convicted African-American killer named Howard Wash. Collins presided over Wash’s trial and over a subsequent grand jury that refused to indict the men accused of lynching him. The jury’s inaction opened the door to an early attempt by the federal government to step in on a Mississippi lynching case, prosecuting it as a criminal violation of Wash’s right to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. At McGee’s first trial, when Collins talked about the perils of “taking the law into our own hands,” it was probably the Wash case, with all its associated headaches, that he had in mind.
Wash was a middle-aged tenant laborer who worked for a white dairy farmer named Clint Welborn. Early in the morning on May 18, 1942, the two had an argument that apparently started because Wash overslept. Welborn yelled at him not to bother getting up—he was fired.
Nobody saw what happened next, but several people heard it from their beds. Wash’s fourteen-year-old son, Howard Jr., testified that he heard the sound of a metal milk bucket slamming into something solid—“four licks,” he recalled. Welborn’s daughter, Patricia, said she heard three blows and a “peculiar gurgling.” Wash went back to his house, changed his shoes, and calmly told his son and fifteen-year-old daughter, Frozine, that they would have to
fend for themselves. Their mother was gone—at the trial, it wasn’t made clear why, or where she was. Wash walked off and eluded capture for six weeks. He was arrested seventy miles away in the south Mississippi town of Poplarville.
At the trial, Wash claimed self-defense during brief testimony that was halting, mumbling, and hard to believe. Yes, he said, he’d been late for work, but Welborn went into a rage, cursed him, and raised a shovel to strike him. He used the bucket to block the shovel and he hit Welborn once, by accident. Though Wash claimed he didn’t realize he’d struck Welborn fatally—he lived for two more days—he ran away because he was scared of what the Welborn family would do in revenge.
The prosecution insisted he was lying. A doctor who treated Welborn said his skull was “broken…in many various and sundry directions,” indicating a purposeful beating. Wash was convicted on October 16. In a surprise development, the jurors didn’t give him the death penalty. Instead he was sentenced to life in prison.
For friends and relatives of Clint Welborn, this manslaughter-style sentence wasn’t enough. At around 1 a.m. on the 17th, a group of roughly fifty men showed up at the Laurel jail and demanded to be let in. Luther Holder, a deputy sheriff and jailer, was asleep inside, along with his three children and two other deputies. He phoned the sheriff, J. Press Reddoch, who rushed over and tried to talk the mob into dispersing. They pushed him aside and forced Holder to unlock a heavy door that sealed off the cell areas. Wash was taken away just after 2 a.m.; he was found the next morning hanging from the “Welborn bridge,” which spanned a creek near the dairy farm.
Wash’s lynching was one of three in south Mississippi that month. Around 1:30 a.m. on October 12, the teenagers Lang and Green had been killed near Shubuta, under mysterious circumstances that are still impossible to sort out. There’s no reliable account of the events that got the boys lynched. There was little public investigation at the time, and the newspaper stories that appeared offered conflicting details.
But a story in the Chicago Defender, a prominent African-American newspaper, may have come closest to being accurate. Six months after the incident, the paper published a report by a black journalist named Enoc P. Waters, who traveled to Shubuta to piece together what he could. Lang and Green, he was told by local blacks, were poor, barely literate boys who worked hard doing odd jobs and collecting scrap metal and rubber. On October 6, a Tuesday, they were scavenging under a concrete highway bridge south of town when a girl named “Martin” walked by on her way home from school. The three apparently knew one another and started talking. A passing white driver, apparently a male, saw them and proceeded to tell the girl’s father that she was being pursued by Lang in an inappropriate way.
What happened next is unknowable: Some accounts said Lang and Green freely confessed to attempted rape at their arraignment; some said they were chasing the girl around harmlessly, as any playmates would. The boys were arrested and taken to jail at Quitman, the county seat. The next few days passed uneventfully. But on Monday, after midnight, a mob went in, threw a blanket over the jailer’s head, and took Lang and Green off to their horrifying deaths.
The Wash, Lang, and Green killings were all covered nationally, although more so in African-American papers and the Daily Worker than in mainstream publications like the New York Times. In the black press and on the left, there was intense interest and a call for a coordinated federal response. The Daily Worker reported on the creation of a new National Emergency Committee to Stop Lynching, chaired by left-wing New York congressman Vito Marcantonio, who vowed to keep pressure on until the lynchers were identified and arrested.
There was a reasonable chance of that happening, since Mississippi’s governor at the time, Paul Johnson Sr., promised to do something and seemed to mean it. He publicly criticized the local sheriff for not notifying him about Lang and Green’s arrest—Johnson would have moved them to Hinds County immediately—called the lynchers murderers, and promised to hunt them down. After Wash was killed, Johnson sent a state guard contingent to Laurel to help maintain order while suspects were brought in and questioned. During that period, the scene around the Jones County Courthouse looked remarkably similar to the opening days of the McGee trial.
“The courtyard is bristling with soldiers, who, at the instigation of Judge Burkitt Collins, were sent here by Governor Johnson,” the Leader-Call reported. “Tear gas bombs, hand grenades and riot guns, bristling bayonets, are in readiness to cope with any trouble that may come up.”
The state’s effort produced five firm suspects in the Wash lynching but nothing on Lang and Green. Then, on October 20, it was reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would help investigate the case, and that Johnson publicly welcomed its input. That was significant in 1942. To invite federal intrusion into a Mississippi criminal case with racial overtones was risky politics, but Johnson followed through. He told his own investigator, John Byrd, to share anything he knew with the FBI.
Bureau field agents from Jackson spent several days asking questions in Jones County, filing a thick report on November 4 that described the Wash lynching in great detail. Mack Lee Lewis, an African-American prisoner who was also in the Laurel jail on October 16, told the FBI that Wash seemed to know what was coming. Earlier in the evening, he said, Wash’s wife had visited him with a three-year-old child in her arms. “[Lewis] said he heard WASH say to her: ‘Well, a man wasn’t born to live forever,’” the report said. “Then he kissed his baby and told it goodbye. WASH lay down on the cot and never got up until they came after him.”
Somehow, every lawman in town failed to anticipate what Wash had easily intuited. “Officials had no indication of mob violence prior to the mob first endeavoring to enter the jail about 1 a.m.,” the report said. Jones County sheriff J. Press Reddoch was at home asleep when he got a call from the jail saying a mob had formed. Reddoch told FBI agents he loaded a rifle with sixteen hollow-point bullets, drove to the jail, stood in front of the crowd, and spent nearly half an hour urging them to disperse. “He appealed from a patriotic viewpoint,” the report said, “from a family viewpoint, and even requested the crowd to get on its knees and pray with him.”
Reportedly, a mob member told Reddoch the discussion could continue if he would put down his rifle. He handed it over to a colleague and was quickly grabbed and dragged out of the way. Later, Reddoch vowed that he would find and arrest all the members of the mob, but as Byrd reported, he soon got bodychecked by powerful men in Laurel. The morning after the lynching, Reddoch had already arrested three men when he was summoned to lunch with a trio of unnamed businessmen at Laurel’s Pinehurst Hotel.
“BYRD later returned to the sheriff’s office and found the sheriff there,” the report said. “…[T]he sheriff seemed to have completely reversed his prior decision to arrest all members of the mob.” As he told Byrd, “The local business men advised me to go slow on this.”
There were no state criminal indictments in the Wash lynching, but federal charges were filed in Jackson in early 1943 against five men, including Luther Holder, the jailer, and two relatives of Welborn’s, Allen Welborn Pryor and Nathaniel T. Shotts. The charges against Shotts and another man were later dropped for lack of evidence.
In April, the three remaining defendants were tried before a twelve-man federal jury in Hattiesburg. The defense, led by a prominent Hattiesburg lawyer named Earle Wingo, stressed the issue of government intrusion, arguing that the FBI’s role represented unwarranted interference with a state-level judicial proceeding. Prior to the verdict, Judge Sidney Mize reminded jurors that the case wasn’t about states’ rights, but about whether the prosecution had presented enough evidence to warrant a conviction. Whatever factors the jurors weighed, the result was a rebuke to the federal government: All three men were acquitted.
McGee’s first trial was held on December 6, a Thursday. The prosecution, led by Albert Easterling and District Attorney Homer Pittman, had had plenty of time to prepare and, in fact, presented a case that off
ered more substance than later critics cared to admit. But the trial wasn’t remotely fair, since the defense was nullified by handicaps that no judge should have allowed.
It took place in a town full of angry people who wanted to kill the defendant, a man who was so frightened that he apparently couldn’t communicate or function. His lawyers, Boyd and Koch, weren’t given any time to put a case together, so they had no witnesses to speak of, and their cross-examinations were almost nonexistent. Even so, they managed to do a few things right, filing motions related to issues like sanity and venue that would give them (or somebody else) grounds for appeal later on.
Once again, McGee was brought to town under armed guard, dressed in fatigues and wearing a helmet until he was offloaded from a military truck into the courthouse. A newspaper photographer snapped a picture of him inside the courtroom, capturing an expression of pure terror that gripped McGee during the entire trial. “He was trembling, wild-eyed, unsteady on his feet and jibbered continually and inaudibly throughout the day,” the Leader-Call said. “He showed no recognition of his mother when she took the stand, and none of her when she prayed over him….”
The first order of business was a sanity hearing, to determine whether McGee was mentally fit to be tried. Boyd told Judge Collins that, while he was no expert on mental health, something was wrong with McGee, because he and Koch had been unable to get him to speak at all.
“It becomes our painful duty to announce that we cannot get one word in the world out of this man,” Boyd said. “I do not state what is the matter with him. I never saw him to know him until Monday morning. If I ever saw him I didn’t know it, I probably have, he has been here all these years, was raised here, but we take him in the room and try to get something out of him and can’t. We get his mother in there and she can’t get a word out of him, and she prays over him…. Of course, he looks more to me like a wild hyena than anything else. I don’t know why, and I’m not saying why. He may be sane and may not be. I’m not a mental specialist.”
