Anatomy of Injustice (20 page)

“Yes, sir,” said Holloway.

W
HEN
H
OLT
had finished reading Holloway’s testimony, she was aghast, dumbfounded. A writer of a cheap crime novel wouldn’t have dared to invent the kind of things that took place. The police had let Holloway into the house to clean it less than twenty-four hours after the crime had been discovered, before anyone had been arrested, before even an arrest warrant had been issued. That the policemen Coursey and Johnson had allowed the person who had found the body, and who therefore in Criminal Investigation 101 should have been a prime suspect, to roam through the house unescorted was beyond comprehension. The questions cascaded in Diana’s mind. As Holloway walked through the house, why had he left the television blaring, the alarm clock ringing, the coffeepot on? Why had he gone to get Mrs. Clark? And what about the gloves he put on before opening the closet? From that moment on, Holloway was a suspect to Holt, even if he had not been to the police, and the longer she worked on the case, the more her suspicion gave way to near certitude.

J
AMES
H
OLLOWAY
S
R. MOVED
to Greenwood from Macon, Georgia, in 1939, when he was twenty-three years old. He went to work as a meat cutter for Big Star, a chain of self-service supermarkets that was just beginning to open in the South. The war came and Holloway enlisted; he eventually became a second lieutenant in General Patton’s army. Discharged in early 1946, he returned to Greenwood, to the house on Melrose Terrace,
and to Big Star. When the grocery chain wanted to transfer him to a bigger store, in Spartanburg, he declined and opened his own grocery store in Greenwood, Big Dollar, at the corner of Phoenix and Magnolia, on the edge of the black community. “Black people have green money and buy white Sunbeam bread,” he explained to his son.

He was an energetic small-town entrepreneur. After Big Dollar came the Nuway Ice Cream Parlor, on the square, then another grocery store, Jimmie’s Supermarket, on South Main; with four checkout stands, it was one of the largest grocery stores in South Carolina. Eventually, he sold out to a national chain, Piggly Wiggly. He later sold the ice cream parlor and Big Dollar and went into the restaurant business. First he opened Be-Bop, on Phoenix Avenue, followed by Seaboard Diner, on the street of the same name. These catered to Negroes. “Sandwich basket” places, they were called, forerunners of fast-food chains. For less than a dollar, you got a deep-fried pork chop between two pieces of white bread, coleslaw or fries, and an orange drink, which Holloway and his son, Jimmy Junior, made, and which was so big you had to hold it in two hands.

Holloway had another restaurant that catered to whites, where you could get a Delmonico steak, a potato, bread, and tea for $2.19. His wife, Frances, made the pies and cakes; Jimmy Junior was the short-order cook and tended to the jukebox. It was called Holloway Inn, and Holloway unabashedly copied the lettering and blinking lights from Holiday Inn. When a Holiday Inn opened in Greenwood in the early sixties, the first modern hotel in Greenwood, Holloway was hired as manager. Frances ran the food services. Jimmy Junior sat on the roof and watched movies at the drive-in on the other side of Route 25.

A couple of years later, Jim Self, a textile magnate, asked Holloway to run the food service at Self Memorial Hospital, which was built largely with his philanthropy. Frances became the hospital’s nutritionist. She didn’t have much luck with her husband, who was overweight and had a sweet tooth. He retired in 1980, at the age of sixty-four. In good health, he spent time in
his woodshop, building a boat, and at his cabin on Lake Greenwood. Dorothy went there often.

H
OLT GOT UP
from reading Holloway’s testimony and ran down the hall to Blume’s office. “John, you won’t believe this,” she shouted. She begged him to let her talk to Holloway. It wasn’t the kind of request Blume normally got, to start investigating a case as if it were at the trial stage. As he was to learn, Diana wasn’t quite like other law students, interns, or death penalty lawyers.

Holt rented a car and set out for Greenwood. It was summer; the trees along Route 178 were green. She smoked one cigarette after another for ninety nerve-racking minutes.

She parked on the street in front of 207, walked across the lawn, and knocked on the door of the modest redbrick house with a screened porch. Mrs. Holloway came to the door. Holt, conservatively dressed in a summer skirt, introduced herself in her best southern drawl. “I’m a law student at the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center. I’m working on the case of Edward Elmore. Could I speak to Mr. Holloway?” Mrs. Holloway showed her to the den. She meekly excused herself and backed out of the room. Holloway was sitting in a big easy chair—a king on his throne, Holt thought to herself. He was wearing slacks and a short-sleeved oxford sport shirt; he looked like he had just come from teaching Sunday school.

Holt had worried that Holloway would cuss at her, tell her never to come back, and slam the door. But he seemed almost eager, excited, to talk about Elmore and the murder. He started off by saying that he had checked up on Elmore with other folks in the neighborhood he had worked for, and the consensus was that he was hardworking, polite, and trustworthy.

She hadn’t been there five minutes when Holloway volunteered, “I am the only one who could kill her and get away with it.” Before Holt could stammer, “Is that right? Why?” Holloway continued, “The way she trusted me.”

Holloway had a reputation in the neighborhood for pushing
his chest out a bit, trying to seem more important than he was, and now he gave Holt the impression that he enjoyed telling her what he knew. She said very little, just kept writing in her spiral notebook. The neighbors thought he and Dorothy were having an affair, Holloway told Holt. He didn’t deny it categorically. She was too polite, or bashful, to ask. He went on and on, without much prompting. It struck Diana that he showed no remorse or sadness that his dear friend and neighbor for nearly four decades had been murdered; he never choked up, didn’t shed a tear.

“She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth,” he said. “She insisted on the finer things. She would buy anything she wanted. She always wore expensive suits.” Dorothy and his wife, Frances, were about the same size, he said, and Dorothy often gave her old suits to Frances.

To this stranger, this law student he had never met, Holloway spoke with crude intimacy and in a demeaning way about his neighbor. “I don’t see how she wanted any man,” he told Holt. “The coroner’s report showed that her ovaries were messed up. Sex would have been painful.” Why would Elmore have wanted to have sex with her? Holloway asked. “It’s not like she had beautiful breasts or anything.”

He talked about the murder in detail. The killer had gotten in because Mrs. Edwards trusted him, Holloway said. She had opened the door, and the killer had stuck his foot in it, to block her from shutting it. During the ensuing struggle, Holloway claimed she had grabbed a pair of tongs from a kitchen drawer, only to have the killer take them away from her. “That’s what did most of the damage,” Holloway told Holt. “He used the ice tongs on her repeatedly.” Her death had been slow and painful, he said. “It took twenty-five to thirty minutes for her to die.”

Holloway said the police might have suspected him at first, since he’d found the body, and the neighbors had said he and Dorothy had been having an affair. “I told them about Elmore,” Holloway now told Holt. “I have no guilty conscience about this whatsoever,” he said.

Holt could scarcely believe what she was hearing. When
she had finished, she politely thanked him and said good-bye to Mrs. Holloway. She kept calm as she walked to the car. But as soon as she was behind the wheel, she lit a cigarette and then raced back to Columbia. She couldn’t wait to tell Marta what had transpired. Goddamn, how does she do it! Marta thought. She was convinced Elmore would be freed.

Holt, ever bold, went back to see Holloway two more times that summer. He cleared up the mystery of how in the course of their investigation the police had known to look in Mrs. Edwards’s checkbook.

“I told them to get me her checkbook and I can pick out the boy who did the chores,” Holloway told Holt. “I looked in the book, found Elmore’s name, and said, ‘This is the man right here.’ ”

That left another question: How had he known that she paid Elmore with a check? Holt didn’t ask him.

At the end of Holt’s last visit, Holloway seemed to understand where she was headed. “You’re going to try to frame this on me, aren’t you?” he asked her. “Well, we’re ready for you if you do.” Holt wasn’t sure what he meant. (Holloway died in 1994.)

Holt’s suspicions about Holloway grew a few weeks later. She went to Pensacola, Florida, to interview Mrs. Edwards’s daughter, Carolyn Lee. Carolyn received Diana graciously. Turning to her mother’s murder, Carolyn recalled for Diana the telephone call she had received from Holloway.

“Hey, Carolyn, this is Jimmy. Are you sitting down?”

“Hi, Jimmy. Yeah, I am.”

“I hate to tell you, but your mother’s dead.”

Carolyn told Diana she found it cold—and strange.

Upon receiving the news, Carolyn had gone to Greenwood, straight to Holloway’s house. Together they walked over to her mother’s. While there, the phone rang. Carolyn was surprised when Holloway answered it.

“Dorothy’s not here; she’s dead. Good-bye,” Holloway told the caller. It was Dorothy’s boyfriend, Lonnie.

Carolyn told Diana that her mother and Lonnie had planned
to marry. When she went through her mother’s things at the house the day after the body was discovered, Carolyn said, she had found a negligee in a suitcase. She believed her mother had packed it for her trip to North Carolina to visit him.

For Holt, everything was falling into place now. “Motive uncovered,” she thought to herself while interviewing Carolyn. In a word, jealousy.

This was Holt’s scenario: Holloway was jealous that Dorothy was going to meet Lonnie. He had gone to her house on Sunday morning before she was to leave. A lovers’ quarrel ensued. He lost control. He began jabbing her with the paring knife, as if to say, Here, take this; here, take that—which explained why the wounds were so shallow. Then he set about cleaning up the house, which took him all of Sunday. That night, he set the coffee machine and alarm clock, and opened the
TV Guide
to make it appear she had been murdered Saturday evening. Holt couldn’t explain everything, though: Why, for example, had he put the tongs in the drawer to be sure they’d be found?

Elmore may have had three trials, and thirty-six men and women may have found him guilty, but, in Holt’s view, the jurors were not told the truth about Holloway. “They did not know that there was reason to suspect him,” she would argue on one occasion in trying to get Elmore a new trial. “Those thirty-six people did not know Holloway was the one who could kill Mrs. Edwards and get away with it, the way she trusted him so.” Holt’s imagination seemed to get the best of her. “Mr. Holloway had owned a grocery store and was later a director of food services. No one pointed out that all the things used to harm Mrs. Edwards were implements from the kitchen, all associated with food. No one pointed out how arranged the kitchen looked after Mrs. Edwards’s killer left. Someone returned the tongs, used to do ghastly things to her corpse, to the kitchen drawer. Someone closed the drawer, careful that the tongs were still visible to whoever searched the kitchen.”

Holt hadn’t come to this seemingly bizarre hypothesis on her own. A retired New York City cop, Vincent Scalise, whom Holt had interviewed as part of her investigation, suggested it to her.
It was suspicious in and of itself that Mrs. Edwards’s body had been secreted in the closet, Scalise said. He had been a consultant in the investigations into the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, and in his view, Mrs. Edwards’s murder was not a random act of violence but had been carefully planned. It was, in his words, “an organized crime that was made to look like a disorganized crime.” Elmore didn’t have the mental capacity for that, he said.

Holt may have suspected Holloway, but no one else had. Not even Billy Garrett, the one lawyer who believed Elmore was innocent. “I had no inkling that he might be guilty,” Garrett said years later. “He was a pillar of the community.” Jim Coursey, one of the principal police investigators, was aware of the rumors that Holloway and Edwards were having an affair, and he even thought they might be true, but he just shrugged; the police didn’t ask any of the neighbors about the relationship. Roy Raborn, who lived next door to Holloway, wasn’t sure what he would have told them. “I still believe Mr. Holloway was ‘hooty pooty’ around a little bit with her, but I don’t believe he would go that far,” he said. “As for playing around, yeah, but a lot of men do that and they don’t kill.”

B
LUME WAS IMPRESSED
with Holt. When her summer internship was over, he suggested that she move to South Carolina and finish law school there. She kept telling him there was something about her past that he needed to know. He dismissed her, figuring it was about drug use, and that didn’t bother him. She was flattered by Blume’s offer, but she wasn’t about to trade a law degree from the University of Texas, one of the top twenty law schools in the country—where her trial advocacy seminar was taught by the legendary Michael Tigar, a brilliant legal mind and liberal activist, and Dick DeGuerin, a preeminent criminal defense lawyer—for one from the University of South Carolina, which barely ranked in the nation’s top hundred. After she returned to Texas, Blume paid for her to fly back to Columbia every other weekend to work on the Elmore case. Finally, in December 1993, she pulled up stakes in her native Texas and
moved to South Carolina, after the University of Texas said she could finish at the law school there if a professor agreed to hold her to UT standards. She was now divorced from Gordon Holt, after six years and one son. He had scoffed at her desire to work as a death penalty lawyer, said she wasn’t going to be able to make a difference. She had been hearing that all her life, and accepting it, but she was slowly acquiring a sense of self-worth. She had also come to believe that the law was a powerful instrument for doing good.