Murder in Mississippi

MARQUIS W. CHILDS

One night, two years ago next month. Miss Jennie Merrill was murdered in Natchez, Mississippi. . . .

The end of Homochitto Street in Natchez is the beginning of what is called the Kingston Road. Two miles out, on the Kingston Road, is Glenburney, the house in which Miss Jennie lived. It is a white house with a curious, sloping roof line that gives it the air of an old man—or an old woman-—with a hat pulled way down, so that the eyes, the small windows up in the peak of the roof, seem shaded, withdrawn, not a little proud and sullen. But perhaps it is too easy to read that into the appearance of the house, knowing something, a very small something, of the character of Jane Surget Merrill, Miss Jennie. A man who remembered her when she was young and lovely said: "One could not help but feel that she possessed a great reserve of hidden emotion, impulse, resolution. ... It was that that set her apart."

She was set apart, as her house was set apart; the force of her character, her will, shutting out all but one individual and he as remote, as withdrawn from life as she; until at last the house was a fortress, with a sign at the carriage gate, "Keep Out." One August night, two years ago, Miss Jennie's house was broken into. She was shot and dragged through the big, high-ceilinged rooms; there were signs of a fierce struggle, marks of a blood-stained hand; through the tall grass of the yard a line of blood, two bloody combs from her hair, a shattered lamp. But the white house and the stern will, bent to a hitter kind of integrity, were not enough to keep off the formless dark world which Miss Jennie had so long shut out.

In the background of the crime there are details after details exceeding even the pen of William Faulkner. The crime has the quality of a Faulkner story, the way in which these lives are closed away, so that they go on to their wretched destinies without benefit of God or man or beast or anything in this world or the next. It is so complex that one can only suggest what may have happened. And yet, at the risk of omitting vital details of the murder itself, it is important to understand what went before.

PRELUDE TO A CRIME.—There have been thousands of acres of rich sugar land in the Merrill family for a great many years. Elmscourt, with its fantastic galleries of iron lace, just across the road from Glenburney, was at one time the Merrill place. There Miss Jennie was born. But in the eighties her father, Ayres P. Merrill, was named ambassador to Belgium. Miss Jennie and her sister had a brilliant life in Europe. They were presented at the court of St. James in the reign of Victoria. The family had, in a sense, outgrown Natchez. They acquired a town house in New York, and a place in Newport. They were much in Washington. Why, with the death of her father and mother, Miss Jennie should have returned to Natchez no one now remembers. Many Surgets and several Merrills lived in and about the town hut she quickly detached herself from them, bought Glenburney and settled there quite alone.

It was because, they said in Natchez, she was in love with Duncan Minor, and yet she could not marry him since the Surgets and the Minors had hated each other from the beginning of time, and her father had made her promise she would not marry Duncan Minor. He called on her. Every night for thirty years he rode on his horse out on Homochitto Street and the Kingston Road to call on Miss Jennie. The neighbors, who were in the habit of observing such things, said that he stayed very late. They said that he had his own apartments in Miss Jennie's house. They said, some of them, that Miss Jennie and Duncan Minor had been secretly married. But if gossip reached them, they gave no sign. Miss Jennie sawr no other white person. Her Negro house servants went home at dusk.

Duncan Minor, descended from a "first family," is one of the richest men in Mississippi, but the outsider would never know it. A drooping man, with weary eyes, sagging moustache, stooped shoulders, he has allowed his house, shared with a sister, to fall into ruin. The steps of the high verandah slowly rotted and when they were quite gone he climbed in by a ladder through a window. Once, long ago, he bought shingles for a new roof for the house, but he discovered that nails were expensive. The shingles, piled on the ground, rotted, too. It was said that he moved his bed from room to room when it rained.

A Faulknerian tale, fact and not fiction, of Southern decadence and crime, in dark and moldy rooms

Miss Jennie's eccentricities were also a subject for amiable gossip. She had not changed the fashion of her dress since the 'nineties. Although she owned a small motor car it was kept, for the most part, wrapped in blankets and brown wrapping paper under the porte-cochère. When, very rarely, she went to town, it was in an ancient buggy. Rumor had it that in her kitchen she kept a high-wheeled bicycle which was also carefully wrapped in cloths and papers. But, however much Natchez whispered and snickered, these two kept their world at a respectful distance. For they had money, a great deal of money.

THE FAMILY FEUD.—It was not so with the pair at Glenwood, next door to the north, the pair who were the mortal enemies of Miss Jennie and Duncan Minor. At Glenwood, the Dana place, the course of ruin had been devastating and complete. Richard Dana, the last male inheritor of the Southern branch of the family, was a man of culture, a singer and pianist of considerable talent. Like Miss Jennie, Richard Dana surrendered the promise of New York, the larger world, to return to live in Glenwood. He had no money to preserve the sanctity of his hermitage but nevertheless he succeeded in driving people off. They said he was mad, and with reason. Hunters saw him often in the woods, naked, his bearded face with the startling eyes glimpsed and then gone, his cracked laughter coming from farther off, a kind of Mississippi Pan. If they called out to him, "How there, Dick Dana?" he sometimes answered, "I'm not Dick Dana. Dick Dana is singing in Christ Church choir in New York." When old friends of the family came to call—his father had been for many years rector of the Episcopal Church in Natchez—he fled into the woods.

Before the ruin of Glenwood was complete, a companion, Miss Octavia Dockery, came to share the life there; because she, too, was penniless and alone; and, one may assume, brooding over the same kind of thwarted hopes and lost ambitions that were at the root of Dana's tragedy. The daughter of Brigadier General Dockery of the Confederate Army, she had bten a writer of poems and essays in a romantic vein, a promising writer whose work at one time found ready publication. In the town they spoke of her as Dick Dana's housekeeper.

If anything was done around Glenwood, Miss Dockery did it. She carried their drinking water three miles—when it stood too long it got wiggle-tails in it. She cooked in the drawing-room over a small fire built on a box of sand in the great fireplace. She made clothes for Dana out of gunny sacks. She smoked goat's meat over a smudge built on a box of sand in an upstairs bedroom; the strips of goat meat were stretched on an old bed spring. She kept goats, a few pigs, numerous fowls, nineteen cats, and the animals bad the privileges of the house as freely as the human beings who lived in it. Pictures fell from the walls, plaster yielded to the damp, cracked and fell in crazy patterns, a feather bed burst open and feathers sifted slowly through the house, a Confederate uniform lay rotting in a corner with yellowed letters, tarnished silver spoons, books, dimming photographs, indescribable filth. It was a sty, a warren, in which these two lost people lived a timeless existence. In the gossip of the town it was "Goat Castle."

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From this perspective and this distance it is as though the feud that grew up between Glenburney and Glenwood was the one remaining thing that animated these four lives. Its origin is lost. Miss Dockery's goats may have begun it. They were a constant provocation. Miss Jennie bad a rifle and was an excellent shot. She is reported to have killed several goats that trespassed upon her property. Several times she went to law over their depredations, but it was a futile business going to law with Octavia Dockery and Dick Dana.

While the goats were a constant menace to what was at best a fragile peace, little more than an armed truce, there was a deeper source of enmity. In 1912 Duncan Minor had bought up Glenwood for unpaid taxes. A certain number of years bad to elapse before Minor could dispossess Dana. In that interval Miss Dockery appealed to a lawyer in Natchez who discovered a provision in the law to the effect that "infants and persons judged insane" might not be deprived of their property for failure to pay taxes. Miss Dockery had Dana brought into court where he was declared insane. By the same order she was named his guardian. Thus Duncan Minor's plan was frustrated.

It is, obviously, the perfect Faulknerian setting. Vegetable life is rank, lush. The trees, the underbrush, bend over the deep-cut roads so that one drives through green tunnels. The dark, stiff trees are grayed with hanging moss. There seems never enough light, never enough air. Rooms are dim, close, and even tended gardens seem to hold a kind of dusk.

One warm night, two years ago, as Duncan Minor rode out Homochitto Street, according to immemorial custom, a Negro came out of the darkness and hailed him. He told Mr. Minor, and he was trembling and nervous so that Mr. Minor was aware that the Negro boy knew more than he told, that he had heard screams at Glenburney, voices, something was wrong there.

He had heard the screams at seven-thirty, at least an hour before.

Mr. Minor spurred on his horse, and soon reached Glenburney, Miss Jennie's borne, to discover a dark, ransacked house, empty; the bloodstains on the white panels of the door, on the wall, on the floor. This was what he reported to Sheriff Roberts in Natchez, perhaps an hour later.

Certain discoveries were made by Sheriff Roberts and his deputies. Drawers and cupboards bad been opened and the contents tumbled out in an apparently vain attempt to find money or jewels. In the hall, where seemingly a struggle had taken place, was found a man's ancient army overcoat. Just beyond the porte-cochère was a shattered blue-china lamp which Minor said Miss Jennie had kept beside her bed. A thirty-two caliber bullet was embedded in the wall of the dining room, another in the wall of the bedroom. A few yards from the verandah were the bloody combs and a slipper soaked with blood. Early the following morning a searcher found the body on a bed of moss half concealed in a thicket. She had been shot twice, once in the left breast and once through the neck.

Because of the quarrel that had existed between the two households, Dana and Miss Dockery were arrested that night. According to Sheriff Roberts, Dana said, before he was told why he was being arrested or before be supposedly had had time to gain knowledge of the crime, "I don't know anything about that murder." Too, Sheriff Roberts says Dana was washing a shirt, a fact so extraordinary that he made it public. In his room was found a page of a magazine stained with blood. Dana and Miss Dockery were put in jail and questioned repeatedly over a period of three or four days. They said they had heard screams, but because of Miss Dockery's almost hysterical fears they had done nothing about them.

The investigation that followed could hardly be called systematic. Scotland Yard would not have approved. But certain facts were brought out. It was established that the overcoat belonged to one John Geiger, a logger, who had lived until a few days before at the Skunk's Nest, a tumbledown shack on the Dana place. (Current reports were that the Skunk's Nest had at one time been a roadhouse. One suspects that Mr. Faulkner's Popeye must have operated it.) Questioned, Geiger said he had left the overcoat at the Skunk's Nest, upon the insistence of Dana and Miss Dockery, who held it with some squalid bedding since Geiger bad not been able to pay the rent on the Skunk's Nest. Dana and Miss Dockery then said that they had removed the bedding to Glenwood but had left the overcoat on the porch where anyone j might have got it. On the collar of the coat were traces of graying hair, said to be that of a white person, and two or three feathers.

Sheriff Roberts summoned from the police force of Jackson, Mississippi, a finger-print expert. In the course of bis investigation this expert announced that a print taken in the house of the murdered woman corresponded with one of Miss Dockery's finger-prints. He was positive in this identification, less positive in identifying a print of Dana with still another individual print taken from the furniture and walls of Glenwood. Altogether he discovered, according to his report, sets of fingerprints for three different individuals. One of these was a person with a deformed forefinger. Both Dana and Geiger have such a deformity.

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In a short time, the case had taken an entirely different tack. A strange Negro was mentioned, a Negro from Chicago who had stopped at several plantation houses and had asked, in an altogether too uppity and northern fashion, for money or food. Several persons were found who had seen such a Negro—wearing an overcoat in early August—on the Kingston Road near Glenwood. It developed that this Negro had grown up in Natchez. Duncan Minor remembered that a Negro of such a description had stopped him on the road and had said that as a youngster he had been Mr. Minor's yard boy. Mr. Minor didn't remember his face hut, since he had had a hundred or more field hands, that was not unlikely.

By what appears a most fortuitous circumstance for everyone all around, this Negro—at any rate a Negro—was shot dead while resisting arrest at Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Letters on his person from Natchez led to communication with officials there; and in Chicago, where his body had been taken by relatives, he was identified as George Pearles, alias Lawrence Williams, alias Pinkey Williams, the Natchez-born Negro who had been seen on the Kingston Road. A thirty-two caliber revolver in his possession was identified by a New Orleans ballistic expert as the gun from which the bullets that killed Miss Merrill had been fired. A little later a Negro woman named Emily Burns, who ran the hoarding house at Natchez where George Pearles lived during his visit, was arrested. A very brief, and undetailed confession was obtained from her; that she had plotted with Pearles to rob Miss Merrill; that she had witnessed the murder; that Dana and Miss Dockery had given Pearles the overcoat but had had no other connection with the crime. Emily was given a life sentence in the penitentiary.

So, seemingly, the case ended. By the terms of Miss Merrill's will Duncan Minor inherited her entire estate, estimated at a quarter of a million dollars; he knew her wishes and would act accordingly, the will said. Her nieces, gentlewomen who earn their living by secretarial work in Natchez, said this was only natural and right and they would have been amazed had it been otherwise. Duncan Minor bought a new gray suit and took the Merrill nieces to the Kentucky Derby.

A more extraordinary transformation came over the residents of Glenwood. Dana was shaved in a barber shop and put on a suit of clothes. (His jail appearances had all been in striped coveralls.) Miss Dockery squirted the whole house with flea powder and began to admit the hordes of curious people who came each Sunday to the gates. The charge was cents to get within the grounds, cents more to see the house. In a most indecent fashion the whole place had been pawed over while the two were in jail; newspaper men and merely the morbid and the curious had dug into trunks and bureaus and desks, unearthing letters from Charles A. Dana, of New York, to "My dear Cousin," blurred photographs of Miss Dockery looking incredibly young and charming, ancient and valuable books; there had been some thefts until a guard was set over the place.

But Dana and Miss Dockery somewhat overreached themselves. They filed suit against Sheriff Roberts for a considerable sum for false arrest. But the suit resulted in a mistrial at which the flower of Natchez that crammed the courtroom let out a great cheer and the two prisoners at the bar were "chaired" through the town.