I didn’t believe it. She started screaming and wouldn’t stop and I pulled out my gun so she’d know I was serious … she kept screaming and the pistol went off. She kept trying to scream but she couldn’t get her voice.’ Jeannine died slowly, bleeding to death from a small-calibre bullet wound in her neck.
Brooks was tried in November 1977, two months after the first stocking strangling. At the start of the case, District Attorney Mullins Whisnant objected to every African-American in the jury pool, in order to ensure that the twelve men and women who would decide Brooks’s fate were white. At the end of the penalty phase he made his closing appeal, imploring the jury to send Brooks to the electric chair: ‘You have looked at William Anthony Brooks all week, he’s been here surrounded by his lawyers, and you’ve seen him.’ Having seen him, of course, the jury knew he was black.
Brooks, Whisnant said, had treated Jeannine ‘worse than you would a stray animal’. Not content with ‘raping her, with satisfying his lust’, he had let her die ‘very slowly, drip by drip, drop by drop … if you sat down and tried to think up a horrible crime, could you think anything more horrible than what you’ve heard here this week, that this defendant committed on this young lady? Could you think of anything more horrible?’
The defendant, Whisnant said, might be only twenty-two, but rehabilitation was quite impossible: he had been in trouble since he was a child. (As a teenager, Brooks had been arrested for car theft.) Fellow prisoners and guards would be at constant risk of a murderous attack if he lived. The defence was asking for mercy because Brooks had been brutally abused as a child, but for Whisnant this was just an excuse: ‘His sisters talked to you about him being beaten by his stepfather, but they never did say what his stepfather was beating him for. Maybe he needed it. There’s nothing wrong in whipping a child. Some of them you have to whip harder than others. And there’s been children who have been abused and beaten, but they don’t turn to a life of crime on account of it.’
He concluded by appealing to the jurors’ social conscience. Columbus was fighting a war, and men like Brooks were the enemy:
And you can do something about it. You can bring back the death penalty and you can tell William Brooks, and you can tell every criminal like him, that if you come to Columbus and Muscogee County, and you commit a crime … you are going to get the electric chair. You can think of it this way. You know from time to time, if you were a surgeon, and you have people coming to you and maybe they have a cancer on their arm, and you look at it, and you say, ‘Well, the only way to save your life is to take your arm off.’ Or maybe he’s got cancer of the eye, and you have to take his eye out. Sure, that’s terrible, but it’s done because you save the rest of the body. And I submit to you that William Brooks is a cancer on the body of society, and if we’re going to save society and save civilisation, then we’ve got to remove them from society.
Amid the sea of white faces inside the courtroom, that last ‘them’ might easily have been interpreted as a reference not to tumours but to African-Americans. In less than hour, the jury voted to put Brooks to death.
Six years later, in 1983, the Federal Court of Appeals for the US Eleventh Circuit stayed Brooks’s execution eighteen hours before his scheduled death, because of its concern about Whisnant’s rhetoric and the exclusion of blacks from the jury. After another six years of bitterly contested hearings, Brooks was sentenced to life without parole. Removed from death row, the man whom Whisnant had deemed beyond rehabilitation took his high school diploma, and then began to study for a university degree.
The racial connotations of the murders of 1977 were not lost on those who had to investigate them. In a cavernous, oak-panelled suite at his thirty-seventh-floor office in Manhattan, blessed with a dazzling view of Central Park, I interviewed Richard Smith, once a Columbus detective, now the chief executive of the Cendant Corporation’s property division, Coldwell Bankers – the largest real-estate business in the world. The former cop was now responsible for twenty thousand employees, and an annual turnover of $6.5 billion.
The son of a soldier based at Fort Benning, Smith said he’d been faced with a choice of flipping hamburgers or joining the police to pay his way through college. He chose law enforcement, serving from 1973 until 1979 and acquiring two degrees. By 1976 he was a detective, and soon rose to working the robbery-homicide section. Smith spoke in a soothing, understated manner which matched his well-tailored light grey suit and navy shirt. Though he had a very different life now, he stayed in touch with his friends and colleagues from Columbus, which he visited several times a year. He had worked on both the Galloway and the stocking strangler cases, and his obvious intelligence had made him the effective operational leader of the ‘task force’ established to investigate them.
‘Did the fact that it appeared to be an African-American raping and killing white women add to the impact of the crimes?’ I asked.
The easy flow of Smith’s conversation became more broken. ‘Probably. A bit. Yes: that added to the trauma.’ He cleared his throat, and his face began to colour. ‘The old South has great respect and admiration for elderly people, and to see someone treated that way was incredibly offensive. Retired women are supposed to be untouchable people. Nothing is supposed to happen to them. Most of us took it very personally.’
White women shared his sense of revulsion. At the time of the murders, Kathy Spano, who went on to work in Columbus’s courts, was living with her parents in Wynnton. ‘I knew some of the women who died,’ she told me. ‘They were typical Southern gentlewomen, used to being put on a pedestal. I remember them as very gracious women, and also my mother saying, “Oh, it’s awful what they’ve gone through. I cannot imagine laying there as a black man did those things to me.” Because it was a black man, in the eyes of the neighbourhood, it made his crimes much, much worse.’
The body that had to deal with this mayhem, the Columbus Police Department, had not been a happy organisation for many decades. In the 1960s and early seventies, a series of corruption scandals saw officers fired for accepting bribes and taking part in large-scale burglary rings. Earlier, during the 1940s, no one got a job with the CPD without a nod from Fate Leebern, a bootlegging gangster who ran Columbus’s rackets. Among African-Americans, the CPD had had a reputation for racism since the days of Jim Crow, directed both at black Columbus citizens and at the minority of black officers within its ranks, who were forbidden to arrest white suspects, and worked only ‘black beats’. In the late 1960s, just one of the city’s fifty-two black officers had been promoted to sergeant, and none above that rank. Whites received higher pay.
One freezing January night I drove to south Atlanta to meet Robert Leonard, an African-American former Columbus patrolman. A stooped, haunted figure, he told me that together with some of his black colleagues, he had joined the force after returning from service in Vietnam. There they had grown used to something like equality. It was warm inside Leonard’s house, but as he recalled his experience, he shivered.
‘We’d been out there fighting for our country. When we got to the Department, they wouldn’t let us drink from the water fountains. They were reserved for whites. We had to go down to the basement, and drink the water they used for washing patrol cars.’
In 1971, Leonard was going to night school, studying for a degree in police science.
‘There were only two blacks in the class, and it seemed to me that the captain who was taking the class was deliberately marking us down. So a white cop and me, we had a discussion, and agreed to swap papers. I knew my paper was good, and when he turned it in under his name, he got an A. His paper was pretty good too. When I turned it in under my name, I made a C.’
Leonard and the other African-American officers tried to tackle the rampant discrimination by founding a new organisation – the Afro-American Police League. They attempted to make formal representations to the CPD, but its chiefs retaliated swiftly. One black cop was arrested for contempt by his white colleagues when he failed to make a court date, despite having called in sick, said Leonard; another was fired for damaging patrol-car tyres – after risking his life chasing a suspect.
‘They started chopping us off, one by one. It got to the stage where relations between black and white cops had gotten so bad that we were pulling guns