Anatomy of Injustice (5 page)

Elmore worked hard, doing chores around people’s homes in some of the most fashionable neighborhoods of Greenwood. In a good week, in good weather, he might earn $600; most of the time he earned between $200 and $300. Many of his customers were elderly widows, friends and neighbors of Dorothy Edwards’s. They liked him. “He was a black man that southern women got along with,” recalled James Bradford, a lawyer. Elmore painted and did odd jobs for Bradford’s mother and his mother-in-law. He was polite, deferential, sweet-natured—in a word, he was “servile,” as blacks were supposed to be. Slight of build, he was not at all physically threatening.

Elmore’s history was notably void of any clashes with the law. He was never arrested for drugs or drinking. Indeed, he had no criminal record whatsoever, except for a few minor charges arising out of fights with his girlfriend, Mary Dunlap.

They had met at the Depot, a Greenwood nightclub. “Oh, he’s so handsome,” she said to her girlfriend when she saw him in the crowd. He was taut and had an Afro with a slight reddish tint. She was five foot six, lithe, and beautiful. He came over, introduced himself, and asked her to dance. “That done it, he was my date for the night,” she remembered, a glint in her eyes even many years later. She invited him back to her apartment. He was proper. They had a couple of beers, and he left.

A week later, she saw him again at the Depot. “That night he stayed over,” she says. Their relationship had begun. She was eight years older and married, with two small children. After she separated from her husband, Elmore moved in. She lived in the Greenwood Gardens Apartments, a small complex of two-story buildings on the south side—the black side—of Greenwood. Mary’s apartment, on the ground floor, had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen—and three televisions. Elmore brought all his clothes; Mary didn’t need a second closet for them.

It was a tempestuous relationship. She was temperamental. He was jealous. “He just wanted me all to hisself,” she said. “He didn’t want me to do anything unless he was right there.” Especially, he didn’t like her running around in short shorts and skimpy singlets. That would set off near-childish temper tantrums. But he was a good man. He babysat her children. He gave her money for household expenses. Though he had smoked marijuana as a youngster, he didn’t use drugs. He drank beer but didn’t get drunk. When he wasn’t working, he’d stay at home and watch sports on TV.

They quarreled regularly, and on two or three occasions she complained to the police that he had hit her. She declined to press charges, and some doubted the incidents had ever occurred. There was a correlation between Mary’s complaints to the police about Elmore and the failure of her ex-husband to make child support payments. Was Mary taking out her anger at her ex-husband on her new boyfriend? In November 1981, for instance, Mary filed charges against her ex-husband; the next day, she filed a complaint against Elmore, claiming he had hit her. This time she signed a warrant. Elmore was arrested.
He pleaded guilty and was fined $212, all but $40 suspended. Ten days later she called the police and said he had taken her pocketbook out of the car and stolen $60. She declined to prosecute. After that he moved out, but they continued to see each other—and to fight.

On Saturday, January 16, the day the police said Mrs. Edwards was murdered, Elmore had driven from Abbeville to Greenwood, borrowing his sister’s 1973 Ford LTD, as he often did, hoping to find work. He first stopped at Kmart, where Mary worked. She told him to come back at four, when she would have her lunch break. He left and drove a short distance to the neighborhood where Mrs. Edwards lived. He first went to Mrs. Wingard’s, just around the corner from Dorothy Edwards. Elmore had worked for her before. She didn’t need any chores done, but she told Elmore that a neighbor, Mrs. Blaylock, needed her gutters cleaned. He asked Mrs. Wingard to call Mrs. Blaylock to see if she wanted the work done that day. Mrs. Wingard was happy to do so, and Mrs. Blaylock said yes. She was an eighty-seven-year-old widow who for years had taught piano to the neighborhood girls and boys.

The gutters on the Blaylock house were quite small, making it hard to get a hand into them, which meant a lot of cuts. Elmore told Mrs. Blaylock he wanted $30, which she thought was high, but her gutters were quite clogged with leaves and she really wanted them cleaned. She didn’t want a black man to think she had that much cash in the house, however, so she said she’d pay by check; he agreed.

He worked only a short time, then left to take Mary to lunch.

Elmore wasn’t very happy when Mary came out with two of her coworkers. They all climbed into Elmore’s car and drove a few minutes to Po’ Folks. She ate; he only drank coffee. He didn’t have enough to pay for the meal. She gave him a dollar. He pleaded with her to let him move back in. No. She was firm. They left a few minutes before five, and he drove them back to Kmart. He went back to Mrs. Blaylock’s to finish his work.

He didn’t do much before it was dark and starting to rain.

“Come inside while I write your check,” Mrs. Blaylock said.
It wasn’t customary for a white woman to let a black man into her house, but Mrs. Blaylock later testified at Elmore’s trial that it was the only humane thing to do; she could not let him stand in the cold. He stayed a few steps inside the door while she went over to the kitchen table and wrote out a check for $15.

He drove to the Kmart shopping center, got out of his car, walked to the pay phone in front of Big Star, and called Mary. She was irritated. She didn’t have time to talk, she said. She was doing inventory. But did he have $10? He did, from the $15 check he had just cashed. He walked into Kmart and found her in the shoe department. He gave her the money.

He went back outside and waited. At 9:30, she finished work. She had asked her brother Donnie to pick her up. He was there in Mary’s car, a 1976 Mustang, along with his wife, Sue.

Walking to her car, Mary saw Edward parked in front of Big Star. She ignored him. She climbed in with Donnie and Sue, and they drove on Route 25 past the Holiday Inn and McDonald’s. They headed to Mary’s mother’s house, to pick up Mary’s daughter. They sat around talking until 10:30 or a bit later, and then they all went to Mary’s apartment at Greenwood Gardens.

Around 12:30 a.m., Elmore showed up. When he knocked on the door, Sue opened it. Elmore rushed in and went straight to Mary’s bedroom. He’d had a couple of beers. She insisted that he leave. It got louder. Mary’s daughter was crying. Mary and Edward were yelling at each other. He asked her if he had left any clothes at her house. No, she said. She had thrown them all away. That set him off again. He took off his coat and started unbuttoning his shirt, then just ripped it off and threw it on the floor. Another temper tantrum.

“Mary, I want you, can’t nobody gonna git you,” Edward told her.

“I told you to go on, go on, we’re through, we’ve been through,” Mary shouted back.

Elmore sat down on the floor. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere, ain’t goin’ nowhere without Mary.”

He wouldn’t leave. So Mary decided she’d leave, go over to her mother’s. On her way out, she picked up his shirt and threw
it in the kitchen wastebasket, put on her own jacket, turned out the lights, and left. She spent the night at her mother’s. Sunday morning, she went back to her apartment. She realized Elmore had spent the night there. He was gone now. She threw his shirt in the trash outside.

Elmore had left about 7:00 a.m., stopped at Fast Fare, a convenience store and gas station, and bought a dollar’s worth of gas, enough to get him to his mother’s in Abbeville. He spent Sunday drinking beer and watching television.

On Monday, the day Mrs. Edwards’s body was found, Elmore went into Greenwood looking for work but decided the weather was too bad and returned home.

G
REENWOOD POLICE
, warrant in hand, began looking for Elmore on Tuesday afternoon. He wasn’t hiding, hadn’t run. He was three blocks away from Mrs. Edwards’s house, having resumed his work cleaning the gutters at Mrs. Blaylock’s. Less than twenty-four hours before, she had seen the police cars at her friend’s house and soon learned what had happened, but she saw no reason to be nervous about Elmore. When he finished, she gave him a check for $15, which he cashed, and then he drove home to Abbeville. That evening, he drove back to Greenwood to see Mary, as if their Saturday fight hadn’t happened or they had fought so often that it didn’t faze him. It was a repeat of Saturday. Her sister-in-law Sue opened the door and let him in. Mary was in the bedroom. She shouted that she was finished with him and told him to leave. He refused. They argued. He said he was going to buy cigarettes. Mary yelled that when he came back, the door would be locked. That’s okay, he said; he would come in the window in the children’s bedroom. He’d done that often, and she never objected. He went for cigarettes, came back, and climbed through the window. Again, she demanded that he leave. He wanted to stay.

Mary had had enough. She was going to call the police. She didn’t have a phone at home, so she threw her coat on over her nightclothes and stomped out of the apartment. He followed. She got into her Mustang, and he hurriedly climbed in on the passenger side. She drove four blocks to Fast Fare, got out, and walked to the pay phone, which was outside. He was right behind her. She called the police. She told the duty officer that her boyfriend had broken into her apartment and that he wouldn’t leave. She and Elmore got back in her car and returned to the apartment. It was after midnight.

The Greenwood Gardens Apartments were only a mile from the Greenwood police station, and within minutes, officers Ray Manley and Randy Miles pulled into the parking lot. They went to building 15, at the south end of the complex, and knocked on the brown door with an
A
on it. Mary let them in and pointed to Elmore. When Manley heard the name, he recalled the arrest warrant that had been issued only a few hours earlier. He radioed for backup.

Detectives Gary Vanlerberghe and Perry Dickenson, who were patrolling nearby, arrived within minutes.

“This is Elmore,” Manley told them.

“Are you Edward Lee Elmore?” asked Vanlerberghe.

“Yes, sir.”

Vanlerberghe, who had joined the Greenwood Police Department in 1978 after leaving the air force, asked Elmore to step outside, which he compliantly did.

They told him he was being arrested for the murder of a woman on Melrose Terrace. “I didn’t do it,” Elmore said softly. Elmore’s demeanor surprised Vanlerberghe. Elmore didn’t resist; he didn’t give them any verbal abuse. “Docile” was how Vanlerberghe described him. Maybe he didn’t do it, Vanlerberghe thought.

Elmore and four cops, including Manley, a fourteen-year veteran on the force, who was a huge man—280 pounds, with a nineteen-and-a-half-inch neck—walked to the parking lot. The police patted Elmore down, but they didn’t handcuff him. They
put him in the backseat and drove to the jail, officially called Greenwood Law Enforcement Center, a one-story, sand-colored brick structure built in 1976. It was 2:45 a.m.

Elmore sat at a table across from Detective Dickenson, who was in street clothes. Johnson and Coursey were present. Dickenson read Elmore his Miranda rights, which were printed on a card he carried in his pocket, as police officers around the country have done since the Supreme Court’s landmark 1966 ruling in
Miranda v. Arizona
that a defendant’s statement to police is inadmissible at trial if the suspect has not been advised of his constitutional rights to a lawyer and to remain silent.

“Do you understand each of these rights I’ve explained to you?” Dickenson said.

Yes, said Elmore.

“Do you want a lawyer?”

No, Elmore said.

“Do you want to answer questions now?”

He was willing to—but he was befuddled. Who was he charged with murdering? he asked Detective Dickenson again.

“Mrs. Dorothy Edwards.”

Elmore said he didn’t know any “Mrs. Dorothy Edwards.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you do not know Mrs. Edwards, the elderly lady who lives on Melrose Terrace, the street behind the First Baptist Church?” Coursey asked impatiently.

“No, I do not know her,” Elmore said.

“You mean you did not do any windows or gutters for Mrs. Edwards?” Coursey said.

“I do windows and gutters, but I don’t know a Mrs. Edwards,” Elmore said.

There were a lot of seemingly simple things Edward Elmore didn’t know or comprehend. He couldn’t tell you the street Mrs. Edwards or Mrs. Blaylock lived on, or any of the other people he worked for; he only knew how to get there. He told Dickenson and Coursey he had worked for “Mrs. Henrietta,” but Henrietta was the street—near Melrose Terrace—and the woman who lived there was Mrs. Wingard.

Sergeant Johnson showed Elmore the State Farm Insurance
card on which he had scrawled Mrs. Edwards’s name and phone number; the police had found it in his wallet. Coursey told him that the police had a check for $43 that Mrs. Edwards had written to him and that he had cashed. Now Elmore knew who they were talking about.

Coursey asked Elmore if he would give a blood sample. He signed a consent form. Coursey also wanted hair samples. He pulled a comb through Elmore’s Afro. He then took him into the shower and ordered him to lower his jeans. He didn’t notice any injuries or bruises in the groin area, he would later testify. Coursey pulled on a pair of latex gloves and ran the comb through Elmore’s pubic hair. Normally that was all that the police would do; the hairs that were loose and fell out during combing were enough for comparison purposes. But with a tweezers, Coursey yanked out more hairs. Eight or ten hairs, maybe a dozen, are enough for comparison purposes. Coursey collected at least sixty. He put the hairs in a ziplock baggie, which was sent to SLED for analysis.

Tom Henderson took over the questioning. When Elmore was first brought into the police station, Coursey had called Henderson, who was asleep at his mother’s. He dressed quickly and was at the jail in minutes. Henderson again advised Elmore of his Miranda rights. Elmore again said he didn’t need a lawyer, that he would answer any questions.