Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose

cultivation of local contacts, before I was able to acquire an invitation to venture beyond the big iron gates bearing the legend ‘B.E.’ that guard the entrance to the club’s driveway. My lunch, as the guest of a delightful, politically liberal couple who made me promise not to jeopardise their social standing by thanking them in print, was adequate, if not exceptional – a salmon filet with wilted greens, slightly overdone, and a chocolate torte with mixed berries for dessert. It would not have won a Michelin star, but on the other hand, I had been living amid the fast-food and chain restaurants of Columbus, and it was the tastiest meal I had eaten for weeks. The service – from a pair of young black waiters – was efficient and polite, without being over-attentive. As for the surroundings, as one gazed through the dining room’s panoramic windows at the scene of utter tranquillity, it was difficult to imagine that Columbus had a long history of violence.

      After coffee in the lounge, I picked up my coat and made ready to leave. Elizabeth Senne, the maîtresse d’hôtel, saw me from the passageway and hurried over, detaining me at the door. She seemed awkward, agitated. ‘Please don’t make anything of the fact we haven’t got black members,’ she said, ‘and they do come as visitors. Really, they are very welcome.’ She touched my arm confidentially. ‘I think perhaps it’s the joining fee: it’s a lot to pay if you’re not sure you’re going to fit in.’

      ‘How much is it?’ I asked.

      ‘I can’t tell you that. But you know, most of the members are old families, and although newcomers are very welcome, there is a distinction. There is one guy who worked his way up from selling insurance. And although he’s seventy now, he’s still a newcomer. So maybe they sense that. You know what I mean?’

      The joining fee, I discovered later that day, was $7,500. On her veranda that same evening, I described the club to my African-American friend Vicky Williams, and mentioned Elizabeth’s closing remarks. Vicky laughed, surprised at the way some people chose to spend their money, then came up with an alternative hypothesis. Mrs Senne, of course, was an employee: she could not be held responsible for following the club’s policies. But Vicky said, with a bitter little shrug, ‘It’s like, you’re a reporter, and you’re good at getting people to tell you their stories, and maybe you can tell when they’re lying. That’s how it is as a black person, when you encounter racism. People can seem ever so nice, but sometimes, you can smell it.’

       TWO We’ve Got a Maniac

      The black fiend who lays unholy and lustful hands on a white woman in the state of Georgia shall surely die!

      REBECCA FELTON (1897)

      Hours after nightfall, when the last lights are going out and the only sound is the rustle of the pines and sweetgums on the balmy Georgia wind, the terror that enveloped Wynnton seems closer, more palpable. I’d planned to take a slow drive, to pause and stare at these moon-shadowed dwellings as once the killer saw them, in the moments before he pounced. My guide, a local architectural historian, kept hurrying me on. ‘People here might not like it if we dawdle,’ she said. ‘You don’t want to have to explain yourself to the police. Besides, a lot of people here have guns.’

      If one knew nothing of its history, Wynnton after dark might feel no different from any American neighbourhood. But knowledge cannot be undone, and despite myself I shared her unease. I had seen the crime scene photographs, and the passage of more than two decades had done nothing to diminish their horror. It wasn’t just the bodies, their swollen faces seeming to betray a heart-rending mix of fear and resignation. What conveyed the sense of violation most was the ordinariness of their surroundings.

      Inside the houses we were driving past, policemen’s cameras had captured life’s final debris. In one home, the story of a death struggle was told by large-print books, some still stacked neatly on their shelves, others strewn across a patterned carpet; in another, the floor was covered with an old lady’s intimate garments, ripped from closets, then used by the killer to fashion his weapon. Most poignant of all were the family photographs, still on their tables and dressers. Amid this everyday banality lay the victims: twisted, bruised, exposed.

      The horror began to surface at 10 a.m. on Friday, 16 September 1977. Dixon Olive worked in the city’s public health department and had been fretting indecisively for more than an hour. Mary ‘Ferne’ Jackson, his boss and colleague, had failed to show up for work. She was a woman of meticulous and unchanging routine, and Olive had already spoken to Ferne’s best friend, Lucy Mangham. Early the previous evening, Lucy said, she had picked up Ferne from her red-brick bungalow on Seventeenth Street in Wynnton, and they had gone together to what Lucy called ‘an enrichment school’ at St Luke’s United Methodist Church on Second Avenue, a spacious neo-Georgian edifice. Afterwards, Lucy took Ferne directly home, and waited by the kerb while she unlocked her door. She had noticed, she told Olive, that Ferne’s bronze-coloured Mercury Montego was parked in its usual space outside. Lucy was away to her own house, only a street away, by 9.45 p.m. Having spoken to her, Olive decided to phone the police.

      Mrs Jackson, who was fifty-nine, had been Columbus’s Director of Public Health Education for twenty-six years. A widow, she had no children, and in her head-and-shoulders portrait she looks a little austere, as if the years of giving lectures on the dangers of smoking or the need for a healthy diet had begun to weary her. But she was much admired. She was about to be named Public Health Educator of the Year by the American Public Health Association. Her nephew, Harry Jackson, a successful businessman, was planning to run for Mayor.

      When Jesse Thornton, the first police officer to respond to Dixon Olive’s call, arrived at Ferne Jackson’s house, he could see no sign that anyone had forced an entry. The doors were locked, the windows unbroken, and had he not been alerted by Mr Olive and some of Ferne’s neighbours, he would have been tempted to leave. But her car, they pointed out, was missing. Thornton spoke by radio to his patrol commander, who advised him to get inside the house and look around. He used the knife he always carried to remove the mesh insect screen from the living-room window, and to jiggle the lock until he could get it open.

      Many years later, Thornton would tell a murder trial jury what he did next. The first space he came to was the hallway, and straight away, ‘I could see something that wasn’t right.’ Ferne’s approach to tidiness was as meticulous as her time-keeping. But in the hall, said Thornton, ‘There was stuff laying on the floor, papers, articles, just scattered all over the floor. There was a pillow on the floor, there was a suitcase that was opened, the drawers had been opened on the dresser, and stuff was pulled out and hanging out of it.’ He continued, very slowly, down the passage towards Ferne Jackson’s bedroom, his hand poised over his weapon. ‘Once I got to the bedroom, I looked inside,’ Thornton said. ‘That’s when I saw the body on the bed.’

      Ferne’s sheets had been pulled up round her head, and her nightgown tugged upwards, in order to expose her hips, pubic area and waist. Thornton could see there was blood on the sheets.

      It fell to the Columbus medical examiner, Dr Joe Webber, to conduct a post mortem. The killer, he wrote in his subsequent report, had tied a nylon stocking and a dressing-gown cord together to make a single ligature, which was wrapped around Mrs Jackson’s neck three times, leaving three ‘very deep crevasses’. There was a large area of haemorrhage and bruising on the left side of her face and head, so that the white of her left eye was ‘almost obliterated’ by bleeding; the result, he believed, of a massive blow to her head. The white of her right eye was a mass of tiny, pinpoint petechial haemorrhages where her blood, deprived of oxygen, had burst from its vessels close to the surface, a common sign of strangulation. The small hyoid bone at the front of the throat was fractured, and there was more bleeding inside her neck. Her brain was swollen, another symptom associated with an interruption to the blood supply. Her sternum, or breastbone, had been fractured, an act which would have required the application of enormous force: ‘It apparently had been flexed and pressure applied to the point that the bone snapped about midway between the upper and lower ends.’ Finally, her vagina was bloodied, torn and bruised. Although Dr Webber could not find spermatozoa, he felt it would be reasonable