Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong - Softcover

Bonner, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307948544 ISBN 13: 9780307948540

Publisher: Vintage, 2013

Synopsis

From Pulitzer Prize winner Raymond Bonner, the gripping story of a grievously mishandled murder case that put a twenty-three-year-old man on death row.
 
In January 1982, an elderly white widow was found brutally murdered in the small town of Greenwood, South Carolina. Police immediately arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a semiliterate, mentally retarded black man with no previous felony record. His only connection to the victim was having cleaned her gutters and windows, but barely ninety days after the victim's body was found, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Elmore had been on death row for eleven years when a young attorney named Diana Holt first learned of his case. With the exemplary moral commitment and tenacious investigation that have distinguished his reporting career, Bonner follows Holt's battle to save Elmore's life and shows us how his case is a textbook example of what can go wrong in the American justice system. Moving, enraging, suspenseful, and enlightening, Anatomy of Injustice is a vital contribution to our nation's ongoing, increasingly important debate about inequality and the death penalty.

About this title

About the Author:

Raymond Bonner practiced law for a decade and taught at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. He later became an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for The New York Times, where he was a member of a Pulitzer Prize–winning team in 1999, and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He has also written for The Economist and The New York Review of Books, and blogs at the Daily Beast and theatlantic.com. He is the author of Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador, which received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award; Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy, which received the Cornelius Ryan Award from the Overseas Press Club and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism; and At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife. He lives in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE

Greenwood, South Carolina, 1982

A ferocious snowstorm hit the South in January 1982. An Air Florida 737 crashed into the Fourteenth Street Bridge in Washington, D.C., and then plunged into the icy Potomac River, killing seventy-eight people. In Atlanta, temperatures fell to near zero. Some 160 miles east, two inches of snow covered buildings, lawns, and cars in Greenwood, South Carolina. On the front page of the Greenwood Index-Journal, there appeared a picture of Emily James, two and a half years old, bundled in a snowsuit, watching "in amazement as her family went sledding." Government offices and schools were closed. In a graceful hand, Dorothy Edwards wrote "Snow" in the squares on her calendar for Wednesday and Thursday, the thirteenth and fourteenth.

Along with some ten thousand homeowners, Mrs. Edwards was without power for thirty-six hours. She jumped rope to keep warm. She was seventy-six years old but could have passed for fifty-six, a petite five foot three, size 6. Every morning, she pulled on her leotards for thirty minutes of exercise. She was a handsome woman, reserved, very much a lady-"elegant in a comfortable sort of way," in the eyes of her daughter, Carolyn. There had been no TV dinners or fast food when Carolyn was growing up; the dining room table was set with china and silver for every meal, breakfast included.

Dorothy's home since the end of World War II was on the north side of Greenwood, on Melrose Terrace; her three-acre wooded plot backed onto Edgewood Cemetery, adding to the feeling of seclusion and tranquillity- except for the nights when young men brought their six-packs for parties among the dead. The west end of the half-mile-long, leafy street is anchored by the First Baptist Church, founded in 1870. The current stately structure with its cathedral sanctuary and stained- glass windows was erected in 1954; the bell tower was added in 1968. Dorothy lived where the boomerang-shaped street curved, at 209. Most of her neighbors were elderly. Christine Henderson, whose husband had died in 1967, lived in a white brick house with a large lawn across the street, at 210; her son was a criminal investigator for the state. The redbrick house at 213 belonged to Mildred Clark, a widow, who was the neighborhood recluse-she didn't even answer the door for trick-or- treaters. At 205 was Roy Raborn, a salesman at Fred Smith Co., a men's clothing store, who had landed at Omaha Beach in 1944. Dorothy's neighbors thought she was a drug company heiress, which was not quite true. She was well-off, having inherited close to $1 million from her mother, while her stepfather had been an executive with Geer Drug Co. in Spartanburg, South Carolina, a lovely town at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Dorothy's mother, Beatrice Ely, had moved to the South from New York after she divorced; her husband was a jeweler in New York City. Beatrice raised her daughter to be independent and refined. They spent vacations in the mountains, where Beatrice taught Dorothy to ride horses and shoot; years later, Doro-thy's neighbors were not alarmed when they heard the crack of a rifle from the yard behind her house. "Did you get it, Dorothy?" a neighbor would shout, knowing she'd spotted another snake.

Beatrice sent her daughter to Converse College, a women's liberal arts school in Spartanburg. The school is strong in music and sends graduates to symphonies and conservatories around the world. Dorothy, a coloratura soprano, won local, regional, and national singing contests. When she was thirty, she took a train to New York to appear on Major Bowes' Amateur Hour, performing "Carmena." She took second place. It made front-page news in Spartanburg.

A few months later, back in Spartanburg, she married James Edward Edwards, the son of a well-liked family doctor who would accept a chicken or vegetables from a patient's garden as payment. Dorothy and James, known as Ed, had met in college when he was at Wofford, a liberal arts college near Converse. They were married on a Thursday morning at the Church of the Advent, in a ceremony marked by "simplicity and dignity," the Spartanburg newspaper reported in a prominent article. The bride, it noted, wore "a becoming fall suit of beige wool with collar of faux fur."

Ed and Dorothy's only child, Carolyn, was born in 1939, and soon afterward, Ed went off to war, a U.S. Navy Seabee. After the war, he moved his family to Greenwood. They bought a marshy plot. Ed drained it, filled it, landscaped it, and built a spacious two-bedroom house; later he added a screened-in porch and a guest room.

He worked primarily in construction, and became Greenwood's first civil defense director in the 1950s. He was a generous, big-hearted man who "championed the underdog, and hired the handicapped," his daughter recalled. A heavy drinker, he eventually joined Alcoholics Anonymous and helped set up several groups throughout the state. He died at the age of fifty-eight, in 1966. It was a devastating loss for Dorothy, but she had a strong inner resolve, and gradually she found a strength and independence that impressed close friends. She now put much of her energy into painting, displaying remarkable talent; the walls of her home were decorated with her work. She also made needlepoint pillows and hooked rugs, passing hours in front of a large frame stretched with a rug, peering through a magnifying glass at designs she had bought from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "My brains are in my fingers," she would say jovially to Carolyn.
THE TOWN

Greenwood, named in the early 1800s after a plantation that the owner's wife had called Green Wood, has rich chocolate soil, fertile for small-scale agriculture. But it had grown as a textile town- Greenwood Cotton Mill opened in 1889, a second mill in 1896, and a third in 1897. At its peak, there were 250,000 spindles in the Greenwood environs. In 1897, the town's voters-all white males, of course-approved a $25,000 bond issue for a courthouse and jail. By the turn of the century, the population had soared to 4,828 and nine railroad lines passed through the municipality, bringing twenty-seven trains each day. Traveling salesmen stayed at the Oregon Hotel, the only hotel in town until the 1960s.

Though perhaps today "an hour and a half from everyplace else" (as President Obama would describe it good-naturedly during his presidential campaign), Greenwood residents have much to boast about in their history. After World War I, they saluted Supreme Allied Commander Ferdinand Foch with a huge celebration on Main Street, slightly wider than the length of a football field at the time-before office buildings went up. In 1954, the street was packed with cheering residents turned out to welcome a local girl who had been crowned Miss Universe, Miriam Stevenson. The small town has produced the Swingin' Medallions, modeled on the Beach Boys; a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court; and three star quarterbacks in succession for Clemson University. Greenwood residents are crazy about their sports. The high school football coach Julius "Pinky" Babb became a legend, winning more than three hundred games between 1943 and 1981. "We were confident in our excellence," said a resident.

It was a white, Protestant community, primarily Southern Baptist. It had very few Catholics until the 1960s, when some northern companies began to relocate in the Emerald City, as the town calls itself. As for blacks, fifteen years after the Supreme Court had declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that separate schools for blacks and whites were unconstitutional, and a year later ordered integration "with all deliberate speed," Greenwood's high schools were still segregated. The segregationists held out until 1969, and then they gave in grudgingly. Greenwood doesn't hide its racial past. A war memorial sits at the corner of Oak and Main, in front of the redbrick, seven-story Textile Building. American Legion Post No. 20 erected it in 1929. A pole carrying the Stars and Stripes extends from a six-foot- high granite base. The bronze plaque on the west side of the base lists the World War I dead in two categories-"White" and "Colored." Thirty-one "whites" and 24 "coloreds" gave their lives. The "colored" include Henry Chin. Another plaque was added after World War II. It also racially divides the men who were killed in action: 131 "white" and 11 "colored." The racial categories were eliminated for the Korean War-12 men from Greenwood are remembered in alphabetical order. Twenty- four men died in the Vietnam War; their names also listed alphabetically.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, C. Rauch Wise, a lawyer and probably Greenwood's only card-carrying member of the ACLU, offered to replace the segregationist plaques from the first two wars with plaques that listed the dead alphabetically. He quietly took the proposal to the mayor. After some inquiries, the mayor, an African American, reported back that it couldn't be done. The monument didn't belong to the city, he said. It belonged to the local American Legion post, which opposed the change. A few years later, in 2010, Wise tried again. Again, the legionnaires said no.

Over the decades Greenwood grew out, not up. The eight-story Grier Building, at 327 Main Street, was the tallest in town when it was built in 1919 and is the tallest today. Greenwood's charm gave way to sprawl, and the town became indistinguishable from thousands of others across the country-shopping malls with enormous parking lots, chains replacing independents, fast-food franchises. A small grocery store owned by Dorothy's next-door neighbor Jimmy Holloway was bought by a supermarket chain, which later sold to a chain steak house.
THE CRIME

Dorothy spent Christmas 1981 with her daughter, Carolyn, and her grandchildren. Carolyn had married-she was now Carolyn Lee-and was living in Pensacola, Florida. Dorothy returned home on Sunday, December 27, she noted on her calendar. On Wednesday, Edward Elmore, a lean black man with bright eyes, knocked on the back door. With only a fifth-grade education and of limited intelligence-he could do simple addition and subtraction only if he used his fingers-he worked as a handyman. A few weeks earlier, while working for one of Dorothy's neighbors, he had noticed that the gutters on the house at 209 were full of leaves; he asked Dorothy if she would like him to clean them. Mrs. Edwards said yes. She showed him where the ladder was, underneath the porch. The job took him about two hours, for which he was paid $3. Come back in a few weeks, after the leaves have finished falling, she said.

On December 30 he returned, cleaned out the gutters, and washed the windows as well. While Mrs. Edwards was writing him a check, Elmore told her that the paint on some of the window frames was peeling. He was a good painter, he said. She told him to call in a month or two, when the weather would be better. She slowly spelled her last name and phone number, and he scrawled "Edwards" and "229-4087" on a State Farm Insurance card, which was in his girlfriend's name for her 1976 Mustang; he put it back in his wallet. Dorothy later told Jimmy Holloway what a fine job Elmore had done and showed him the clean windows.

The new year was promising to be a good one for Dorothy. On the calendar square for January 3, she wrote "Lonnie's." Lonnie Morgan was a businessman from Tryon, North Carolina, retired, living comfortably on the proceeds from the business he had sold. He was a member of the Tryon Hunt and Riding Club; Dorothy, a keen rider, was planning to join. They had been introduced by a Converse College classmate of Dorothy's and had been seeing each other for a couple of years; she had recently told neighbors that they were talking about getting married. She visited him in Tryon on January 3. The following Saturday, January 9, she went to a choir party at the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, a couple of miles away, over on South Main. She attended regularly and was a standout soloist in the choir.

On Thursday afternoon, the fourteenth, when a front-page headline alerted residents, "More snow, sleet heading this way," Jimmy Holloway called around three. He and his wife, Frances, were about to go grocery shopping and offered to pick up some things for Dorothy. The Holloways were her closest friends. They had met at the Oregon Hotel on the eve of World War II, and Jimmy had encouraged Dorothy and Ed to build on the plot next to his.

Jimmy walked over and got her shopping list; then he and his wife drove to the Winn-Dixie supermarket, out on Route 25. When they returned, Dorothy asked Jimmy if he'd lift a five-gallon kerosene canister out of the trunk of her car; she had bought it for a portable heater, which she needed now, with the unusual cold. He carried it through the kitchen and into her den. The three of them chatted for a while.

On Saturday, Jimmy called Dorothy and again offered to go grocery shopping for her. It was sleeting, but the temperature had moved above freezing, melting the worst icy patches. She said she could go herself. She also told him that she was planning to go to North Carolina the next day to visit Lonnie. After hanging up, she drove to Winn-Dixie. In the checkout line she chatted with an old friend, Coley Free. She showed him pictures of her two grandchildren and her two- year-old great-grandson, and then she took her change from the checkout girl, put it in her purse, and drove home. It was late in the afternoon.

THE CRIME

Forty-four hours later, the body of Dorothy Ely Edwards was found in her bedroom closet. She was clad only in a reddish-purple housecoat with a ruffled collar, zipped up the front.

There was a horrible bruise on her right knee, and her lower right leg was reddish purple. Her knees were drawn up. A dress boot was wedged between them. Pieces of glass were stuck in the dried blood on her left wrist. Her left ear was nearly severed. The areas around both eyes were black-and-blue. Her hair was matted with blood.

The murder rocked the community. Most of Greenwood's murders were in the black neighborhood-blacks killing blacks in barroom brawls, over money or a woman, or in domestic disputes. The perpetrator was usually caught quickly, often with a gun or knife still in his possession. Those crimes didn't particularly disturb the white community. This one did. "Widow Stabbed to Death" screamed the headline at the top of the front page of the Greenwood Index-Journal, accompanied by a picture of policemen at the house. (On that day's front page there was also an article reporting that the Supreme Court, by a vote of 5-4, had overturned the death sentence of Monty Lee Eddings, who at the age of sixteen had been convicted of killing an Oklahoma highway patrolman with a sawed-off shotgun; the court said that the jury had not been properly instructed to consider mitigating evidence.)
THE POLICE

"Myself and patrolman Alvin Cook were on Smythe Street when we heard a radio dispatched message of a possible Code One, which is an attempted murder," Sgt. John Owen wrote in his official report. (The dispatcher had it wrong-Code 1 is murder.) "Myself and Alvin Cook then proceded to 209 Melrose Terrace. And we arrived there at 12:26 p.m. Myself and Patrolman Cook went to the home where we found Patrolman Holtzclaw at the rear of this home." Holtzclaw was talking to Jimmy Holloway, under the carport, next to Edwards's 1976 Cadillac; her large-wheeled bicycle, with handlebars like a gnu's horns, rested against the back door.

Owen noticed what appeared to be an impression of a shoe print to the left of the steps leading into the house. It was reddish. "I believe to be blood," he wrote. He took Ho...

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0307948544
• ISBN 13: 9780307948540
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336