David Rose - Violation - Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South

Half an hour after the alarm had been raised at the Illges residence, a second, home-made panic buzzer sounded two blocks away on Carter Avenue, inside the bedroom where Fred Burdette, a physician, lay sleeping. His neighbour, Ruth Schwob, a widow of seventy-four who lived alone, had asked him to install an alarm in her own bedroom, wired through to his, so that he might summon help if she were attacked. When the alarm went, Burdette tried to call Mrs Schwob, and listened as her telephone rang without answer. Then, while his wife phoned the police, Burdettte ran to his neighbour’s home. By the time he reached her door, the occupants of several squad cars were already approaching the premises. The first officer to reach Mrs Schwob, Sergeant Richard Gaines, later described what he saw:

I climbed in through the kitchen window, over the kitchen counter, had my flashlight. I started going through the house room by room, without turning on any lights, using only my flashlight. And after about two minutes, I got to the back of the house and looked in through the bedroom door and saw Mrs Schwob, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had a stocking wrapped around her neck; it was hanging down between her legs, also laying on the floor was a screwdriver. Then I went over to where she was and when she saw me she said, ‘I thought you were him coming back.’ And then she said, ‘He’s still here, he’s still in the house.’ And I went over and I checked the necklace – I mean the strangling – the stocking that was wrapped around her neck to make sure it was not too tight, and it was loose.

Gaines and his colleagues checked the rest of the house. But Mrs Schwob was mistaken. The stocking strangler had gone.

The Columbus newspapers published next day, 12 February, warmly celebrated Mrs Schwob’s survival. Like Kathleen Woodruff, she was a very prominent citizen and patron of the arts. For twenty years after the death of her husband, Simon, in 1954, she had continued to run his textile firm, Schwob Manufacturing, and continued as board chairman emeritus until it was sold in 1976. In 1966 she was Columbus’s Woman of the Year, and her other accolades included the local Sertoma Service to Mankind Award. She was, reported the Ledger , ‘credited with almost single-handedly raising more than $500,000 for the $1.5 million fine arts building at Columbus College’, which was named after her husband.

Ruth Schwob, the Ledger said, had survived the attack because she was a regular jogger and unusually fit for her age.

I just awakened and he was there. He was on the bed and had his hand on my throat and wrapped pantyhose all the way around. Then he pulled the thing tightly round my neck. He had a mask on his face, I think he had gloves on, and it was dark in my room. There was no flesh showing, and he never uttered a sound. It was quite a struggle. I fought like a tiger. He choked me so bad, I passed out. I think the police just missed him. I don’t know how long he was in the house or whether he was gone before the police arrived.

After her rescue, the police sealed off the surrounding streets as officers combed the earth for a scent with bloodhounds and a helicopter equipped with floodlights hovered overhead. There were shoe tracks leading from Schwob’s kitchen window, where the strangler had forced his entry with the screwdriver found by her bed. But once again, he escaped. ‘If he doesn’t have knowledge of the area,’ the task force leader Ronnie Jones told the Ledger , ‘then he’s mighty damn lucky.’

Having found Mrs schwob, and having failed to find the strangler, Jones and his staff assumed that he had left the area. In fact, he merely fled two blocks to 1612 Forest Avenue, a house diagonally opposite the Illges castle. It was not until 11.30 in the morning of the following day, 12 February, that Judith Borom called on her way to church to check on the woman who lived there, her mother-in-law Mildred, a lone widow, aged seventy-eight. Earlier that day Judith’s husband, Perry Borom, had been discussing Mildred’s safety with his business partner, George C. Woodruff Junior, Kathleen Woodruff’s son. ‘I was telling him, “I’m really worried about your mama,”’ Woodruff told reporters later. ‘He said he’d sent a man out to put screws in the window to keep it closed.’

Judith was with her three children. She parked her car in the back yard, and rang the back doorbell. There was no answer, but she could hear the television playing. She told her son to go round to the front while she tried to peer into Mildred’s bedroom, at the building’s side. Then she heard the boy screaming: ‘Mama, come here, Mama, come here.’ At the front of the house a plate-glass window had been broken, and the front door was ajar, wedged open with a piece of carpet. Judith called the police. Mildred’s body, raped and strangled with cord from a Venetian blind, was lying on the hall floor. The autopsy reports suggested that she was being murdered at the very time that dozens of police were keeping busy at Ruth Schwob’s house two blocks away, and the bloodhounds and helicopter were conducting their futile search of the neighbourhood.

As usual, the task-force leader Ronnie Jones was among the first on the scene. At the sight of the killer’s sixth victim, he collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Ronald had begun to take it personally,’ Detective Luther Miller, who now took over his responsibilities, later recalled. ‘He felt like it was his responsibility to stop the strangler. He had – we had all been working day and night to protect these women. He started thinking it was his fault each time one was found dead. It was just an emotional breakdown. Chief McClung decided he needed a break.’

The CPD’s relationship with Columbus’s eccentric coroner, Donald Kilgore, remained somewhat strained. On the day after Mildred Borom’s killing, it took another turn for the worse. Fibres found on her body, Kilgore told reporters, were ‘black, Negroid, pubic hairs’. Kilgore, it will be recalled, was a mortician, without scientific training. At the time he made this controversial pronouncement, proper forensic examination of the corpse and the crime scene had barely begun. Presumably, Kilgore had noticed that the hairs were dark and curly.

Four days after the discovery of Mildred Borom’s body, the Columbus police turned for help to the realm of the spirits. At the behest of Detective Commander Herman Boone, two officers took John G. Argeris, a well-known psychic who was said to have helped police solve crimes in New England, on a drive through Wynnton. Argeris, the officers’ report stated, ‘determined that the suspect lives in the area … The suspect was also determined, without a doubt, to be a white male, with large eyes, having a full beard. Suspect either has money or his family is considered well-to-do. Argeris determined that the suspect has the initial “J” … Argeris further stated that “J” should stand for John.’

The pressure on the cops was already almost intolerable, but on 1 March it grew still more severe. Police Chief McClung received a letter, signed ‘Chairman, Forces of Evil’, purportedly a white vigilante group, saying that if the strangler were not caught before the beginning of June, a black woman named Gail Jackson, whom the group had already kidnapped, would be murdered. If the strangler were still at large in September, the letter went on, ‘the victims will double … Don’t think we are bluffing.’ Gail Jackson, it rapidly became apparent, was indeed missing.

With commendable sang froid , McClung separated the ‘Forces of Evil’ investigation from the stranglings case. Eventually, after the receipt of further letters that demanded a $10,000 ransom, the FBI’s psychological profilers suggested that the author of the letters was black, and that Gail Jackson was probably already dead. They were right on both counts. The ‘chairman’ of ‘Forces of Evil’ was an African-American soldier from Fort Benning named William Henry Hance, and he had killed Jackson and two other women. Towards the end of 1978 he was convicted and sentenced to death. Twelve years later he died in Georgia’s electric chair.