by Alex Heard
Breland, during his interview with Spivak, talked about why Pyles went down this road. “She testified that she said…‘Oh. All right. If that’s all I can do it.’ You’ll find in that first [trial] record…that she testified that she didn’t holler because she didn’t want to arouse her children—didn’t want to wake her children up. That…shows that he didn’t rape her, by her own testimony.”
It was a weak argument—Mrs. Hawkins thought the rapist was going to kill her and her family, a state of mind that would seem to constitute “fear”—but Pyles hammered away, obviously planning to bring the matter up on appeal.
“What did you say when you screamed?” he asked her.
“I said, ‘What do you want?’”
“I believe that you testified under oath at the former trial that after he told you what he wanted, you said, ‘Well, if that is all, I can take it.’”
“That is a lie. No, I didn’t, not in my right mind.”
“…I will ask you if, at a former trial, you did not testify, ‘I called him, not loud, because I did not want to wake the children up in the next room, as I didn’t know but what he had already killed Troy. And when I called Troy, he said, ‘He is back there asleep, Miss,’ and then you said he told you what he came for. And you said, ‘Well, if that’s all I can take it.’”
“I don’t remember that I did,” she said.
As the trial went on, Pyles did what he could to attack the prosecution’s case. He argued that the testimony placing a Laurel Wholesale Grocery truck near the scene of the crime at the right hour—and McGee along with it—was purely circumstantial. Did Paul Britton see a truck roll by his service station at 5 a.m.? So what? He didn’t see the driver. Did Rose Imbragulio see a truck on the street that “looked like Wholesale Grocery” to her? Fine, but she didn’t clearly see anybody inside it. The prosecution didn’t bother denying that none of the witnesses or the victim could identify McGee by sight, and that there was no physical evidence proving that he was the rapist.
Dr. Grady Cook testified again, saying he’d examined Mrs. Hawkins at his clinic in Hattiesburg, had found “living spermatozoa,” but had no way of knowing whose cells they were. Mrs. Lonnie Meador, the Jones County circuit clerk, produced the bloodstained boxer shorts again, which had been stored in a file cabinet inside a vault. But by now the bloodstains were gone. During cross-examination, Pyles held up the shorts and asked Police Chief Wayne Valentine to show him where the stain had been.
Valentine pointed to the spot, acknowledging that nothing was visible anymore. Pyles asked if “ten or eleven months” was enough time for a bloodstain to go away on its own. Valentine didn’t know. Did the chief order an analysis of the clothes to determine that the stain was actually a bloodstain? He hadn’t.
Pyles also argued that McGee’s alleged confession, which he reportedly gave of his own volition, was tainted, because McGee had no counsel present and was terrified about what might happen to him.
“Chief, did you have him handcuffed?” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“And there was about six or eight men around him in the city jail in Hattiesburg?”
“I imagine there were that many.”
“And all of you had guns.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pyles made a motion to exclude the confession, partly on the grounds that McGee “was told in the presence of officers with guns on that it would be best for him to tell the truth.”
Collins overruled. Questioned by the prosecution, Valentine described how he had driven McGee to Magnolia Street in Laurel and asked him, “Willie, what was your truck doing on South Magnolia Street?” McGee said he’d had a breakdown in front of a stucco house and that it had taken a while to get it running again.
“Up until that time, Chief, had you said one word to Willie about him raping anybody?”
“Well, I had talked to him on the way up there about where he had been the night before and what he had done,” Valentine said. “And after I had talked to him about this truck being broke down, I asked him about going in this house of the Hawkins up there, and then he set there awhile. And after a while he said, Yes, he did go in it, and then as we went up the street, I asked him to show me where the truck was broke down, and…he showed me…and then I says, ‘Willie, show me the house that you went in.’ And we went up the street about a block further and he pointed over to the Hawkins home and the one next door and he said, ‘One of those two houses right there.’”
“Chief, did he or not tell you then and there that he had committed this rape?”
“He did.” Valentine said he’d asked McGee how he got in the house. McGee said he went in the front door, took a right, and entered Mrs. Hawkins’s bedroom.
After several other witnesses were heard from, mostly law enforcement officials, the prosecution closed with testimony about McGee’s alleged jailbreak in Hinds County and his mental condition. C. M. Herring, the jailer who was beaten up, said he had thought McGee was probably insane—right up until the moment he bashed him on the head with an iron bar. Allen Boutwell, deputy sheriff of Jones County, said he saw McGee react with a smile when Judge Stennis called him to the bench and told him he was transferring the case. A Forrest County deputy sheriff testified that, during his most recent jail stay, McGee knew what was going on around him and recognized his mother when she visited.
“He talked to her in my presence,” he said. “While with her, he led a singing session.”
“I will ask you whether or not Willie can sing.”
“He certainly can. Sang like a full-grown man.”
When the defense’s turn came, Pyles called McGee as his second witness, but McGee didn’t budge from his chair. Court officers carried him to the stand, where he crouched and quivered and said nothing.
“The records show we had the sheriff sit him on the stand bodily,” Breland explained to Spivak. “He didn’t have sense enough to sit up—to put his feet on the stand. We asked him—I asked him several questions. What his name was and such as that. He didn’t answer.” He was excused without having uttered an intelligible word.
Pyles called only a few other witnesses, among them N. B. Bond, who said McGee was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, and a Hattiesburg-based photographer named Bob Waller, who took pictures of McGee at the first trial and noticed that his eyes didn’t bulge when the flash went off, which he called “very abnormal.”
Once again, the longest defense testimony came from Bessie McGee, who said Willie had been turned down for army service at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and Fort Benning, Georgia, “on account of his head.” She said he’d been diagnosed with “‘erysipelas’ of the brains” and named a local physician, Dr. Paul Haney, who was giving him shots.
Asked if she thought Willie was insane, she said, “Well, to my idea there’s something ’nother wrong with him, something ailing him. I tried to get him to know me in there while ago, and he wouldn’t have anything to say to me.”
Pyles asked again: Was he sane or insane?
“To my believing about it, I just believe that his mind ain’t—he ain’t at his self. His mind is bad.”
Under questioning from the prosecution, she described what she said to Willie during her jail visits.
Did you talk to him?
I had prayer with him.
Had prayer with him?
And songs.
Who led the songs?
He led some and I led some….
Willie is a good singer, isn’t he?
Yes, sir, he does pretty good.
And he sang over there in jail, and he sang pretty loud, didn’t he?
Yes, sir.
And don’t you know he was putting on a bigger show at Laurel than he is putting on down here? (No answer.) When he wants to talk to you, he could talk to you, couldn’t he, Aunty?
I don’t know, sir. I will be frank about that.
In his summary to the jury, Pyles pleaded for mercy. �
�We don’t ask you to turn Willie loose,” he said. “Send Willie to an institution where he can be guided and do useful work. The defense asks that the jury find Willie not guilty by reasons of insanity.”
The jury found him guilty, this time staying out eleven minutes instead of two and a half. Collins quickly set a new death date: December 20, 1946.
five
GOD DON’T LIKE UGLY
As I type this into my computer, 59 years later, my insides begin to quiver as they did that night when I was 8 years old.”
Those words are from an unpublished manuscript called “My Mother’s Voice,” which was written by Sandra Hawkins, the second daughter of Troy and Willette Hawkins and the woman I’d communicated with through Mary Mostert for so many months.
Sandra showed it to me in the fall of 2006, when my wife and I visited her and her husband, Brad, at their home in Louisiana. More than a year had passed since I met her for the first time, in Jackson in the spring of 2005. Since then, we’d kept in contact—writing each other directly, no more go-betweens—while I went ahead with my research. In the summer of 2006, I finished a book proposal, which Sandra and Dorothy were aware of, since I’d fact-checked everything I said about them or their parents. (I did the same with the McGees.) They were cooperating, but with a condition that showed how uncertain they still were about all this: They said I couldn’t use their real names in the proposal. Thus, the three sisters were rechristened Amy, Sarah, and Helen.
In August 2006, I e-mailed Sandra, telling her the project was on and repeating what I’d said before: that it didn’t matter what anybody thought they knew about the case, because I was starting from scratch anyway. If they had a story to tell, they should tell it now, before it was too late. I wasn’t in this to take sides, push a political view, or set them up to be humiliated. I promised to listen with an open mind and honestly relate what they had to say.
This time, she agreed, sending back an e-mail that was brief and informal, with a serious personal note at the end. “My parents were devoted to one another and I have never experienced a more loving couple,” she said. “I would be happy to try to help you bring them to life as real people who were dishonored.”
In spite of the progress, everything still seemed a little touch-and-go. At the end of the Louisiana visit, Sandra gave me a printout of “My Mother’s Voice.” But soon after I got back to New Mexico, she had second thoughts and asked me to mail it to her. I did, and I didn’t pull any cute moves like keeping a photocopy. Then she sent it back, apologizing for being so jumpy.
None of that seemed particularly strange. The three sisters, Ann, Sandra, and Dorothy, made up the only advocacy group in the world that existed to defend the memory of the often demonized Willette Hawkins, and it had been a lonely vigil. Journalists weren’t invited into the discussion because journalists were the problem—to the Hawkins sisters, it was their sloppiness and mendacity, coupled with the misinformation pumped out by the Communist Party and Bella Abzug, that had defamed their mother. For nearly sixty years, right up until the time they decided to talk to me, they’d only spoken about the McGee case among family and with a few close friends.
Of the three sisters, Sandra had been the most active about researching the story, with Dorothy in there too. Ann, they told me, tended to stay in the background—for a long time, I didn’t even ask to speak to her—but she was interested enough to keep an ear open for updates. For most of her adult life, Sandra steered clear of the subject herself. Though it never completely left her mind as she went off to college in 1955, got married, and started a family, she had no desire to muck around in old newspaper clips. Why go through it?
That changed in 2004, when she saw the documentary about Beah Richards. As she and her relatives started trolling the Web, they ran into a stack of information that, to them, was false and libelous. McGee had been proved innocent. Mrs. Hawkins had been unmasked as a liar. The entire city of Laurel had known about the relationship for years, but the truth was covered up.
They’d done research on the case before. Back in the early 1990s, when Sandra and Dorothy were in Jackson doing family genealogy work, they looked at some of the McGee material at the Mississippi State archives. Now Sandra really plunged in, just like Bridgette and Tracey, but with one advantage—since she was closer to Mississippi, it was easier for her to do primary research.
Sandra took trips to Jackson, Laurel, and Hattiesburg, where she wasn’t shy about marching into places and asking for what she wanted. But more often than not she came away frustrated. The case was complicated and confusing, important records were missing, and almost all the participants were dead. The circuit court in Laurel only had scraps, and there was nothing in Hattiesburg. The archives had a complete transcript of the third trial, but it didn’t come close to answering all her questions. The “affair” wasn’t even mentioned in there. At what point did it come up?
In 2004, Sandra decided to write down what she could remember from the morning of November 2, 1945, and in her rendition there was no doubt about one thing: Her mother was a rape victim, period. She was brutalized in her bed by a drunk who crawled through a window and slithered into her room like a snake. Echoing the trial testimony delivered three different times by her parents, Sandra wrote that she and Ann were in the bedroom next to the bedroom where Willette had settled down with the baby. Their father was asleep at the back of the house. Sandra was asleep too, but she recalled waking up to a scene of chaos and terror.
The house was pitch black. My mother was screaming and running…with my father running after her and calling after her, trying to catch up with her.
Shortly, there were policemen scurrying about with flashlights. Sirens droning; patrol lights flashing; men shouting; Mother crying in the distance. Ann and I were gotten up and were taken outside….
What had happened? A man had come into our house and attacked our mother while our baby sister was in bed with her. What did he do? As an eight year old, I couldn’t understand what could have gone on. I later learned he held a knife on her and said he would kill her and the baby if she made a sound. He said he would slit their throats….
Could an eight-year-old remember such things? I think so, and it’s only fair to reverse the question: If they happened, would they be easy to forget? Sandra believes Willie McGee was the man who invaded their home, and that the horrors he brought were real, devastating, and permanent.
“That one night changed many individuals’ lives,” she wrote. “I became the ‘caretaker’ of a baby sister. I took it upon myself to nourish her, play with her, watch over her. When I go to bed at night, 59 years later, I pull the cover up to my chin and have slept like that since 8 years of age. In all those years, I have never slept without the protection and comfort of blankets, even in the summer.
“We were forever marked with fear. Through the years, if I heard an unusual sound at night, I would become paralyzed with fear…. I have slept with a light on all night so shadows wouldn’t frighten me.”
Earlier that day, Sandra had greeted Susan and me at the front door to her home, an airy suburban layout with a circular driveway, stately old trees, a pool, and a large backyard that swept down a grassy bank to a lake.
It was a beautiful place earned through a lifetime of hard work. Sandra met Brad when they were both students at Mississippi Southern in the 1950s. She never graduated. Her college costs became too much of a drain on her parents, so she dropped out after a few semesters, moved to New Orleans to find a job, and later married Brad, who went to dental school at Loyola. In 1960, they moved to the town we were in now—Sandra asked that I not give its name—to set up his practice. Neither had any connection to the area. That was part of the idea.
Inside, we sat around a small living-room table that was covered with papers and folders, reminding me of the setup at Bridgette’s home in Las Vegas. Brad, who’d had health problems recently, stationed himself on a couch nearby, with an ear cocked for what we were saying, speakin
g up occasionally—like Harold had done—while we talked and compared notes.
Sandra’s pile of paper overlapped with Bridgette’s, but Sandra had more primary documents, including a complete transcript of the third trial and a large stack of papers from the FBI file on the case, labeled WILLIE MCGEE, which was first obtained by a Maryland historian, Dr. Al-Tony Gilmore, back in the 1970s. She had a photocopy of a tiny old black-and-white photograph of the house at 435 South Magnolia, which showed the side window the intruder supposedly crawled through. She also pulled out a hand-drawn map of the interior, to show me who was where.
The house was a simple, white-clapboard structure with a low pitched roof and a chimney on the north side, toward the front. It was longer than wide and had a floor plan that relied on connected rooms instead of a standard hallway. On the front left was the room where Willette and the baby were together that night, their bed tucked into a corner on what would have been the room’s left side as you faced the street. Lined up behind it was the second bedroom, a bathroom and a small square of hall, and a third bedroom. On the right side, front to back, ran the living room, dining room, and kitchen. In the very back, and as wide as the house, was a screened-in porch with a wooden lower half.
The whole thing came to around a thousand square feet and was nothing fancy: a warren of low-ceilinged rooms, simple furniture, and polished pine floors. This part of Magnolia Street was a solidly middle-class wedge between the white and black parts of town. Laurel’s white upper crust lived in the shady streets and avenues north of the courthouse, about a mile away from there.
