Part 2 of We Shouldn't Name Anything for John Stennis. What really happened in the trial of Ed Brown, Yank Ellington, and Henry Shields? Well, since this is WTW we can't just tell you that small bit of information and have a 3 minute episode. Instead, we've got some historical context, a detailed look at the state's case (argued by Stennis), and then some... more historical stuff. Then finally, some speculation on what might have really happened to Raymond Stewart! Content warning: this episodes contains mention of horrendous racial violence.
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Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How you doing?
Pretty good.
Well, prepare to be bummed.
Oh boy.
Gotta issue that same content note from last episode.
This is part two of the Brown v Mississippi trial and the true crime podcast that we're doing about the murder of Raymond Stewart in 1934.
So make sure you listen to part one.
So I mentioned that the book I read is called, I know I'm going to keep bragging about the one book I've ever read.
But I've read it like four times now, so that's like four books.
Right.
The title of it was A Scottsboro Case in Mississippi.
And you might wonder, what does that mean?
And this is not a deep dive or anything, but just to give you an idea of what these three black men are up against.
The Scottsboro boys were nine black male teenagers accused in Alabama Of raping two white women in 1931.
So 1931, we're in 1934 right here.
And the case is, in terms of what eventually happened with the Supreme Court and all that, it's kind of a mixed bag, but just to read some Wikipedia to you, hun, I know we're kind of Extending our personal relationship on the air here, but I'm going to read some Wikipedia to you and everyone.
Wow.
Yeah.
Let me dim the lights.
Hang on.
Yeah.
So it starts off in delightful old-timey 1930s way, which is on March 25th, 1931, two dozen people were hoboing on a freight train.
25th, 1931, two dozen people were hoboing on a freight train.
And like, I just gotta say, why can't we all just hobo along?
Like, why did there have to be any more to this story?
We could all jump on a freight train, we could play some of that music that was in Oh Brother Where Art Thou, you know?
The little knapsack slung over our shoulder.
Yeah, none of this needed to happen.
The hobos were a mix of blacks and whites, but then all of a sudden, guess who ruined it?
The white people.
One of the white teenage boys saw another black kid trying to get on the train and was just like, nah, it's a white man's train.
And then they, the white kids tried to force all the black kids off, but they weren't able to.
The black teenagers were able to kind of defend themselves.
And so then the white kids kind of jumped off the train or forced off the train and they decided to go talk to the city sheriff wherever they were.
And they said they were attacked by a group of black kids.
Oh my God.
Teenage boys, and that's pretty much a death sentence.
Yeah.
It echoes stories we've heard in recent years of calling the police on a black man.
Police referring several times to being threatened by, quote, an African-American man.
There is an African-American man.
I am in Central Park.
He is recording me and threatening myself and my dog.
Though Cooper does not appear to move any closer to the woman, her call becomes even more frantic.
I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble.
Please send the cops immediately.
A Cobb County man says someone called the police on him for babysitting while black.
Corey Lewis says he was babysitting two children when a white woman approached him in a parking lot.
He says she wanted to see whether the children were okay and even followed him to his house.
The next thing he knew, police showed up wanting to talk to the kids.
That's an age-old, horrific, deadly thing that has been in the white person's arsenal in this country.
Yeah, you'd wish it'd look different nearly a hundred years later, but here we are.
It's definitely different, but not enough different.
Because the group on the train also had two white women.
It doesn't say their age, I guess, but it says white women must have been among them.
Maybe they were 18 or something, I don't know.
Or who knows what the hell the age of being a woman was considered at that time.
I have no goddamn idea.
But anyway, they also decided to like accuse the black kids of rape as well, as I already said.
So it looks like about 10 black kids were charged with rape and in three rushed trials in which they had almost no legal representation, and they're all white juries, they were all convicted of rape and sentenced to death.
Oh my god.
The common sentence in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women.
Even though there was no medical evidence indicating that rape had taken place.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in the book kind of about the interplay between the NAACP, which was, you know, not that old at the time.
I think it was founded in 1909 or so.
And some other groups that had tried to help the Scottsboro defendants.
One was like the Communist Party of the USA and then there's also some of these other groups and because this didn't go great Some of that tension is set up going forward But anyway, they appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court and obviously that didn't fucking do anything because it still has Alabama in it But you got one dissent and it was actually the Chief Justice That's important.
I think one of the things that is somewhat a positive to see is the people who did speak up.
Not enough, obviously, but there are people who did speak up and often suffered reputational consequences for it.
But that wasn't near enough here because ultimately the convictions were affirmed.
So the case ended up appealed, well, the case is, I guess there's like multiple, I don't know how they grouped them, but there's like different trials, you know, but they were appealed to the Supreme Court.
And as a result, this was, we've kind of talked about it a little, but there were more, a few more guarantees given of how a fair trial needs to go.
You know, like that's part of this jurisprudence.
This is just a side stop along the way on our hoboing train here.
So I'm not going to go into the details, but Just worth noting, maybe in a bit of foreshadowing, what happens when the Supreme Court intervenes here.
So here, I'll read again.
The case was first returned to the lower court and the judge allowed a change of venue, moving the retrials to Decatur, Alabama.
During the retrials, one of the alleged victims admitted to fabricating the rape story and asserted that none of the Scottsboro Boys touched either of the white women.
Yeah.
The jury still found the defendants guilty, but the judge set aside the verdict and granted a new trial.
The judge was replaced and the case retried.
The new judge ruled frequently against the defense.
For the third time, a jury, now with one African American member, returned a guilty verdict.
The case was sent to the U.S.
Supreme Court on appeal.
It ruled that African Americans had to be included on juries and ordered retrials.
Charges were finally dropped for four of the nine defendants.
The other five were convicted and received sentences ranging from 75 years to death.
Oh my God.
Three served prison sentences.
In 1936, one of the Scottsboro Boys was shot in the face and permanently disabled during an altercation with a sheriff's deputy in prison.
Clarence Norris, the oldest defendant and the only one sentenced to death in the final trial, jumped parole in 1946 and went into hiding.
Good.
Yeah, this is kind of interesting.
He was found in 1976 and pardoned by George Wallace.
Wow.
Imagine how bad your trial had to be.
George Wallace was like, oh, okay, I'm going to pardon you.
But still segregation today, segregation tomorrow.
Like, geez.
Wow.
But this highlighted kind of the problem that like juries were taken from voter rolls.
Voter rolls didn't contain very many black people because of awful disenfranchisement.
Yeah.
What I wanted to point out is, just knocking another bit of naivete off of, I guess, my brain, when these things get reversed, that's not the end of the story.
In the movies or something, that's usually, ah, it's the Supreme Court.
You get the exterior photo, you know, and it's like, wow, they did it.
They overturned the what?
No.
It's not the end.
It's not the end for these Scottsboro kids.
Yeah.
That did almost nothing for them, actually.
Just a quick note that I knew nothing about this story, Scottsboro, except I think it's a musical.
Yeah, it is a musical.
And I had no idea what it was about until this very moment.
Until you got cast as the lead and you're like, I don't think I should do this.
I don't think this is appropriate casting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No idea what it was about, but it's a musical somehow.
I bet it sucks.
Don't make musicals out of awful racial violence.
That's just my personal rule.
I'm going to follow that rule.
Not everyone does.
Just to grab another couple sentences here.
The prisoners were taken to court by 118 Alabama guardsmen armed with machine guns.
Oh my God.
That might just be to stop the lynching.
Yeah.
You know, like that's, this is nuts.
There's a picture of a crowd gathered, like it's fucking crazy.
And the trials take place in this like fucking hostage situation, you know, with a bunch of angry white people with guns like right outside, you know, it's just, it's absolutely nuts.
So I'm sure these three defendants are going to get a fair trial.
So we left off by, I gave you pretty much what the newspaper version of the trial was.
Right.
Which was like, these heroic police, they asked very nicely, and these three black men confessed all together.
And we're like, we're so glad we're confessing.
Which, you know, right away I would think to any rational person would be like, why would they confess?
They're just going to be killed.
Like they're, they're confessing.
Yeah.
Like they're confessing and then they're going to be hanged.
So why would they ever do that?
One might wonder.
Apparently a lot of people didn't wonder that or didn't care.
And so I left off with that newspaper version and then I've read the entire transcript a hundred times and I want to tell you what happened.
It's man, that's so fascinating.
Also, like I said, horrifying and going to need again, a content note on this one, but it's also just so fascinating to get a glimpse into 1930s law.
There's interesting stuff about these people's lives, you know, all that little extra detail that just puts you right there.
That's really interesting.
There's some combination of how did the law work in 1934 in Mississippi versus also how did the law work when you had black defendants.
Right.
Like, I don't know how much of the rules were just ignored or didn't exist.
You know what I mean?
Like, there's a lot of stuff missing that I would think would be very important.
But I also know that from my knowledge of legal history, you know, a lot of our rights that we consider our fundamental rights Actually didn't exist back then.
Yeah, not till like the 60s, 70s.
Yeah, yeah, and 50s.
Yeah, because the law was truly different.
And a lot of this story later on is kind of about that because, again, this was a key Supreme Court decision.
And a lot of that story, the more legal journey of that, that I'll tell later, does involve the fact that like, hey, we didn't have 14th Amendment rights necessarily because they weren't incorporated to the states.
It was just Oh yeah, if you're charged federally, yeah, sure.
And it's this process of more and more rights being incorporated, or if not incorporated explicitly, they were kind of read into the Constitution and interpreted such that states did need to do certain things in order to ensure you had due process, because due process is important.
But not so important here, apparently.
And it's hard to know, I'm not a lawyer or a legal scholar, it's hard to tell how much of this was the norm, how much of this was the norm just because the defendants were black, or how much of it was like the only thing that ensures things are done right is one fucking judge, basically, at the time.
And then if you appeal If you're able to appeal, then maybe that would correct some mistakes.
But like for the most part, this one judge is the master of this courtroom and their decisions on what is okay and what isn't basically defines the legal process for these three people whose lives are at stake.
Okay, so the state opens their case and arguing for the state, somebody you might know.
Is it Stennis?
It's John Stennis.
Since he is the prosecutor.
We start with kind of the basic stuff.
First up is the victim's brother, and he just testifies about, like, the house layout.
And he made a drawing, apparently.
That's entered into evidence.
Obviously don't have that, but it's in the transcript.
Then neighbor, William Adams, is the one who found the body.
He says he was alerted by Ellis Giles.
So presumably that means Ellis Giles found the body?
That person also appears to be black.
What's odd in a weird way is the transcript will literally say colored, but not always, actually, because they didn't on one of the defendants.
Again, whose mom is the stenographer?
We don't know if it's like how professional, how good of a job anyone does in any of these things.
So fucking hard to tell.
Anyway, Ellis Giles, I think, found the body or alerted William Adams, it says, the neighbor.
But it doesn't say what.
Maybe they just alerted them that like, oh, I haven't seen him today.
Mr. Stewart hasn't shown up where I was expecting to work with him this morning or something like that.
Maybe.
Yeah.
So anyway.
That neighbor stayed until the doctors came.
Dave Owen, another person who just fucking was there, also stayed.
Don't know who he is, but he, I guess, maybe had some business with him or something, because he arrived at the house too, and then he also testified as to some of the details of the murder.
And then, these two doctors are next.
So basically, those people called the doctors.
Who the hell knows how long that took in 1934.
The two doctors that testify.
Again, I'm not a true crime podcaster and I hate true crime stuff.
I only consume it when it's like a really good documentary or something.
So I don't know how they normally do this.
There's probably some like really inappropriate music.
They're probably super excited to give you all the gory details.
I don't know.
But I'll give kind of the picture of this because it's interesting.
I've tried to go through the evidence and figure out like why Anyone was a suspect or like, was it truly just that they were black or not?
It's not easy to puzzle that out.
You would think that would be very easy.
You would think in a trial, the necessary thing that Stennis would have presented is like, so here's why we suspected this person.
Here's how we arrested him.
Here's how, like, no, not really much of that.
Like it's, it's very unclear, believe it or not.
So if I leave any of that out, it's possible I missed something, but it's more, I've read this a lot.
It's more likely they just didn't fucking bother.
It's weird.
And part of that is not necessarily, like, sinister.
In Stennis' mind, these three suspects confessed.
And so, there's a lot of work that I think he didn't think he had to do.
Oh, let me note this.
I forgot to say this at the outset.
These three suspects, Ed Brown, Yank Ellington, and then Henry Shields.
They pleaded guilty.
They go in, they plead guilty, except for Henry Shields didn't plead guilty.
The other two plead guilty.
And the judge just says, nah, I don't understand it.
I don't know if it was because, like, I doubt this, but maybe if you plead guilty, you avoid the death penalty?
But it's 1934 in Mississippi.
I kind of doubt that's true.
But that's what happened.
They pleaded guilty.
It's in the transcript.
So we're only having this trial because The judge wanted to.
The judge was like, I don't accept your guilty pleas, I guess.
Huh.
I don't know why.
There's not much written about it, but like, it's really interesting to keep in mind.
Maybe it's because they were all together and one of them didn't plead guilty.
Maybe?
I don't know.
Who knows?
Anyway, here's what the doctors testified to and some of the other details from some of those other people who were first at the scene.
This guy's dead.
We got broken pieces of a lamp chimney that he was hit with in the head.
And a lamp chimney is just that glass thing that goes above like a little lantern thingy.
He was hit with that.
Large puddles of blood.
Stuart's body was like put against the door.
And it's been interesting trying to interpret some of this old timey stuff.
But there's like the cottonseed room, I guess, because it's a cotton farm.
There's the cottonseed room.
And that's where He was, and he seemed to have been moved there.
And also, his shirt was scorched and burned a little bit.
As for the injuries, it looks like he got freaking axed in the right shoulder, which is awful.
Like, his collarbone's broken, and it's like, that's horrible.
His cheek, right cheek, was like, burnt off or rubbed off, they couldn't tell.
But he had multiple head injuries.
Multiple fractures, four or five in total.
He got, like, a puncture wound.
Like, it looks like, basically, he was brutally beaten to death with several different things.
The doctor said, like, the top of his head, his bones were beat to jelly, in quotes.
So, like, just awful.
But he's not dead.
Like, he was... That's crazy.
Yeah.
Humans are... Like, I don't know how life works, but he held on to it for a while, at least until those people found him.
And then, I think, by the time The doctor, I don't know, but one of the doctors got there.
He was dead.
But like, it's pretty crazy.
He lived for 10 hours, 12 hours.
They don't know precisely because they didn't have Gil Grissom or anything.
They asked the doctors like, well, what caused the death?
And both of them say the same thing.
Basically any of the injuries except for the shoulder one.
Pretty much any one of those were bad enough that it could have killed them.
That they would have been fatal.
Yeah.
So that's like, you know, the first four or five witnesses.
Then it already starts getting weird.
Like that was the most normal part.
Like that was pretty much recognizable more or less as like, oh, that's how a trial works.
You establish the scene and the doctors and the cause of death.
And then it already starts getting weird and Southern and racist and old timey.
The thing about this is I can't tell you what combination of that it is.
Like it might be totally normal, but just old, or it might be totally racist and not normal.
So the next witness is someone with an amazing name, Henry Lavender.
So I'm going to read you the first part here and you see what you notice.
Question.
This is Mr. Henry Lavender and this is Stennis, by the way.
Hey, yes, sir.
Question.
You live in this county over near where Mr. Raymond Stewart did live?
Yes, sir.
Four miles from him.
After Mr. Stewart's, and I wish I could do my foghorn leghorn.
We got to get Daniel Craig to do his like.
Oh yeah.
Knives out.
Yeah.
Like his, that accent.
Yeah.
After Mr. Stewart's death, were you making an investigation or assisting in making an investigation into the cause of his death?
Yes, sir.
Tell whether or not you went to the house of one of the defendants here, Henry Shields.
Yes, sir.
Don't tell what it was, but did you receive any information?
Yes, sir.
We got information there was something down there and we went to make an investigation to see what we would find.
"Tell what you found there.
We went down to his house, we went by Mrs. Etheridge's and asked could we make an investigation.
She told us to go and if we needed to, go ahead and break in.
We went to the window and shook it and it came open.
We went in the house and opened the door and found a pair of shoes by the door where it looked like a bench had been pulled up there and shoes pulled off.
Tell what you did there.
We went and we turned up the bed and looked under the bed and couldn't find nothing.
We got in the kitchen and there was a pen built in the corner of the house about three feet high.
We seen a pile of clothes in there and looked in them and down about that deep, I must be gesturing, in the clothes we found a jumper.
We pulled it out and seen gray hairs on it.
I said, don't you reckon this is hog hair?
We take it to the light and they said, no, this is human.
We spread it out and looked and found blood on the jumper in the front of both arms.
And also all over the back.
And there was some slobber on the back and gray hairs.
That was where they had hit him on the head, I suppose, and knocked the hair out.
You observed the hair of what color there?
Gray.
State whether or not, in your opinion, it was human hair.
It was.
Do you know Mr. Raymond Stewart?
Yes, sir.
What was the color of his hair?
It was gray.
And I'll stop there.
But I imagine gasps in the courtroom, you know.
I like how it's, don't say what brought you over there because they just broke into someone's and they're trying to say that there's probable cause, From best I can tell, that's because it would be hearsay.
So like there's constant objections whenever someone's like, and he said, objection sustained.
So I think he's trying to not have them say like, well, they told me this and that's why I went over there.
So I think that's why that was.
Yeah, okay.
And then the other piece that jumps out at me is, what are his qualifications to distinguish between hog hair, human hair, and whoever's with him?
Which you know.
Yeah, I think you could go further than that.
Okay.
Me?
Yeah.
Who the fuck is this guy?
Yeah, well, that's what I say.
Is he a police officer?
No, he's just a guy.
And I think that's why it clued in at the beginning.
I probably assumed he was involved in law enforcement because of the whole don't say what I thought that that was the he had probable cause to go in there.
But if he's just a random dude.
He's just a guy that just broke through a window.
I believe he's one of the people that one of them lived with.
I can't remember which.
I've absorbed so much information.
But later on, it becomes clear that like that.
And actually, maybe it's worth going into that here.
Each of these black suspects, and I imagine many black people around here at the time, they all live on someone's property.
On a white man's property.
Yeah, they don't get to own their fucking house.
They just, they're sharecroppers a lot of them.
They live on someone's property and Henry Shields is the one, I don't believe he's a sharecropper, I don't think, but he also lives on someone else's property.
Right, well because that's the person who said go ahead and break on in if you need to.
You're just like, and that's an interesting legal question nowadays, I can't remember what the answer to it is, but I think nowadays You're not allowed to just have like if like if we're renting an apartment to somebody and they're a suspect, I can't remember.
It's an interesting legal question.
The police are like, can we search it?
If I'm thinking about how due process works and you want to be protected from unlawful search and seizures and all that stuff.
It seems weird to be like, yeah, but only if you're a homeowner, like if you're a renter, then fuck you.
Like, that seems weird.
I feel like the right should be, well, yeah, wherever you live, that's your home, whether or not you own it.
And you should have the right to be able to like consent or not to a search.
I think that's how, maybe it works now, but I don't know, I'm not a fucking lawyer.
Back then, we're so far away from anyone giving a shit about that, let alone with a black person.
But think about how many levels of weird that is.
This is just some fucking guy.
We have no idea why he suspects this guy, what information he's acting on.
But he's, he's like the most important, he's the first witness in terms of the suspects and not just like the body and the death and the whatever.
This is the first witness that's not just a medical person or someone who found the body.
And this is what it is.
You're Henry Lavender.
Who are you?
No fucking idea.
You're just a guy.
And you, you like did your own investigation.
Oh yeah.
Cool.
So he went to Henry Shields house.
He asks Mrs. Etheridge, I guess, who must be, well, let's be real.
She probably didn't own it either.
Her husband probably did.
But anyway, she gives consent and they go and they search and they find those things.
That is so fucking weird.
Like that is just, I don't know if that's just how things work or that's how things worked when you were black in Mississippi at this time.
But think about, like, chain of custody stuff.
Like, okay, so you're not a police officer.
I don't even trust it when police say they found something.
But like, let alone a guy who's like, yeah, we found this.
And not only that, what's your expert fucking opinion on the hair that you found?
Not hog hair.
It's human hair.
And it was great.
Like, it's fucking... Also, he said that he thought it was hog hair at first.
Yeah, I like that detail.
Interesting.
I won't read the whole rest of it, but like they find the jumper and then he also found an axe in the wood pile.
And so they enter that into evidence and he says, "I picked up the axe like this and I laid it on a stick of wood and I looked on it and I found blood.
The axe looked like it had been freshly washed.
You can see on top there the rust where it was freshly washed.
It looks like it failed to wash off there.
You can see, I must be pointing, you can take it and see for yourself.
Wait a minute, at the time you found it, state whether or not the blood on it appeared to be fresh blood.
Yes, sir.
Okay.
And they introduced that coat and ax and exhibits.
There's a lot of very clearly, virtually every white person involved in this thinks these three black defendants are incredibly stupid.
It's important to remember that these are extremely poor people in the South, and these black people have had no access to education.
They're illiterate.
They've seen nothing but a life of hard labor.
So, like, obviously they're not educated.
I don't know how, like, smart they would be able to be in these situations.
But it strikes me as like, okay, but even trying to take all that on board, if you're going to wash a murder weapon, you think you would fail to wash off the blood of it?
So he's saying like, you can see it was washed, but also anyway, there's still blood on it.
Like what?
Yeah.
There's a lot of that where you're like, oh, I guess these white people just believe they're so stupid they freely confessed and sucked at washing off the murder.
Like all this stuff.
It's just crazy.
How would you think that that would happen?
I don't know.
This is where things get pretty important here.
So the next is Sheriff J.H.
Adcock, Sheriff of Kemper County.
This is where we really get an important event.
Because Stannis starts asking him the basics.
Who are you?
Who are the defendants?
That kind of basic stuff.
And after a couple questions, the lawyer, Spinks, one of the lawyers, and they were all court appointed, obviously.
Right.
Side note, you didn't have a right to an attorney, except, I believe at this time, you had the right to an attorney in a capital case.
So if your life was at stake.
Right.
At this time, I guess you had the right to an attorney.
So just barely, I imagine.
So that's why they had attorneys who didn't want to be there.
And so one of them, Spinks, suggests that the rest of this examination for now be had out of the presence of the jury.
Judge apparently agrees.
And so without the jury there, I guess Stennis continues.
And very clearly, the point of this testimony is the sheriff was the one who heard their confessions.
Or one of, sorry, three people who heard their confessions.
We'll get to that later.
And they are doing, I guess, something that might be the norm, which is, well, we'd better talk about how these confessions happened without the jury there so we can figure out if they're admissible.
It's not entirely clear what rules there are that would make them admissible or not, but I guess there was enough of that infrastructure there somewhere.
to make this something the judge was cool with.
And so they asked some questions.
And while Stennis is asking questions, everything's 100% above board.
Y'all know there was no... I told them you're free.
You talk freely.
Tell the truth.
No harm can come to you.
Yeah, I can read some of this.
Now, before you talk to these boys, tell whether or not you told them who you were and what else you told them.
Well, I talked to them separately.
I told them that I wanted them to tell me the truth about that tragedy over there, that I was the sheriff, Mr. Creekmore was present, and he was a deputy, and that all the other men were officers trying to save them from any harm or danger outside.
And that was the reason that all of them were there.
I said, go on, tell the truth about this thing.
No harm can come to you here.
When you talk to them there, state whether or not you told them whether they must talk or they could leave off talking.
And keep in mind, Miranda rights don't exist at this time.
But there's still some, like, that's the interesting thing is, when we talk about something like Miranda rights, I'm giving you kind of my impression, my educated impression of this, but not expert.
I think there were things like that on a state-by-state basis, you know, like there were different rules that states had, but it's not until these landmark cases where it's like the federal government is like, no, you have to always do, like the Supreme Court says, no, this is something that is implicated By the Constitution.
So it doesn't mean like before Miranda Rights there was no such thing as the idea that anyone had to tell anyone.
You know what I mean?
But it just formalized it and said all states must do that.
So saying that, I think that's the reason for this examination before the jury for a couple of things.
Like okay, did they know what they were doing there?
And also it seems to be important whether or not The sheriff promised immunity or anything?
Because I think perhaps that would have made the confessions perhaps not valid.
I'm just, this is me divining from the fucking tea leaves that are here.
Those seem to be maybe some of the concerns.
I'll continue.
No, sir.
I only insisted on them telling the truth.
I told them to tell the truth and the whole truth regardless of who it might hurt or help.
Did you offer them anything to tell it or did you make any kind of promise of immunity to them?
No, sir.
I told them I couldn't promise them anything at all.
I asked this boy Ellington how he got to Meridian, and he said they took him by Livingston, and I asked him if he knew what that was for.
Did you promise him any immunity from the consequences of whatever he had done?
No, sir.
I told them I couldn't promise them anything.
Was there anything said by you or them, either, that they would be responsible for whatever they would say?
Yes, sir.
I don't know at just what stage that was said, but it was said sometime during the conversation.
Was there any kind of force, threats, or intimidation used by you or anyone there before they started to make a statement?
None whatsoever.
I spoke to them separately, but I was as kind as I knew how to be.
Did they make any complaint about being questioned?
No, sir.
What expressions did they make with regard to your treatment of them?
They seemed to be satisfied, and one or possibly more said that we dealt very kindly with them.
They said to me that I didn't even look like I was mad.
And so he's obviously a state's witness and Stannis asked him and boy, that's all seems above board.
But any rational person would be thinking, well, then why the fuck did they confess?
Like they know that there's nothing in it for them.
That's kind of weird.
But anyway, I guess they're black.
So you can just assume that they don't know anything.
I don't know.
Now we get cross-examination by Mr. Clark and put a little pin in Mr. Clark.
Mr. Clark is the one who is worth a damn, morally speaking.
I don't think he's worth much of a damn Lawyerly speaking, because of a lot of the story I'm going to tell later.
But why don't I say this now, Clark tried to get out of this at first.
So they needed to assign them, but it was because he was sick.
You know, that was the reason he gave.
He's like, I've been dealing with sickness.
He's an older guy.
He was a politician.
I'll get into more of that later.
He tried to get out of it.
The judge said, no, like, no, you can't get out of this.
Turns out that was really fucking important.
Like that was a bit of a stroke of luck because he ended up being the one That's part of the story that I find just so interesting.
So anyway, that's Mr. Clark.
There will be a lot more on that later.
So, this is a cross-examination.
I'm not gonna read all of it, obviously, but here's a selection that I thought would be a bit important here.
Question.
I believe you said in the beginning, you explained to them that they might hang for it.
You asked them if they knew they might hang for it.
I asked them if they knew the law, was such, if they were found guilty of that crime, if they were convicted, they would possibly hang for it.
And they said they knew that.
Do you know whether these boys had made a confession prior to that time, prior to making the confession to you?
Answer, I don't know.
I had heard that.
Did they make any complaint to you about that?
Listen to this.
I don't think they said anything about a confession.
One of the boys, Shields I believe, came in limping.
And he kind of got on the box easy and looked like he was excited.
I said, Henry, sit on that box.
And he said, I can't.
They strap me pretty hard.
I said, make yourself comfortable.
Nobody is going to hurt you at all.
All of us here are for your protection.
Did you understand that the confession that he had already made was brought about by putting him on a box and using a strap on him?
I didn't understand anything about how it might've happened, but he stated that he couldn't sit down.
So he didn't tell you whether he confessed or not on account of that?
No, sir.
I didn't ask him anything about that.
You don't know whether he had confessed or not, but you had heard that he had?
I had heard it.
But you don't know under what circumstances?
No, sir.
At this point, judge says, I think the confession is admissible.
And Clark says, we object to it and accept to the ruling of the court.
Wow.
And this guy's a sheriff and he's saying, I have no idea how, why this happened.
Okay.
Yes.
Liar.
And so the jury comes back.
And so they haven't heard any of that.
And so now we go back to Stannis asking questions of the sheriff and he proceeds.
This is long testimony.
He proceeds to talk about all of the confessions.
There's no fucking videotape.
There's no tape recordings.
And that's an interesting thing in the law that I never understand either, because I guess that usually you don't do that anyway, because of the whole, like, you need to be able to cross-examine whoever's making the accusation.
So I guess this is how it's done.
You just, this person says what they remember about the confessions.
I don't know how a normal trial goes.
I don't know how a normal trial went in 1934 in Mississippi.
You know, all those questions.
But he gives that story, and so does Bryce Stevens, the sheriff of Lauderdale County, who was also there.
And then also, this is great, the next witness after that, fucking Reverend Eugene Stevens.
If you wonder why he was there, well, he's the sheriff's brother.
Yeah.
Cool.
I've kind of coalesced the story from all of those alleged confessions.
So, here is the thrust of the story according to the Sheriff's version of the defendant's confession together, you know, that kind of thing.
So, the defendants met up the night before and they hatched a plan.
to kill Raymond Stewart because he owed possibly one of them money.
I can't even get a fucking clear idea of the motive.
There's a couple different things stated, but it's essentially a money issue that they're going to steal, kill this guy and steal his money, which if you're Ed Brown and you've lived and worked with this guy going on three years and you still live there, are you really going to just kill him and take his money and go back to your house?
And like, that's, How are you going to make money after that?
It's not like you get the farm.
You know, it's just anyway.
So that's the plan they hatch.
There's a lot of corroboration in the details.
There's also a couple contradictions.
So Brown and Ellington say that Shields hit Stuart first, but Shields maintains he never hit Stuart at all.
And that's a consistent thing.
Once again, I think I already said it, but Shields consistently maintains he never hit Stuart at all, and he maintains his innocence kind of the most, but In the end does admit in these confessions to being a part of it.
So they go there, they have weapons including, you know, the chisel, the axe, and there's like some other old-timey like wagon fucking standard something or other.
And they basically kill the guy and then there's disagreement, but somebody searched the house for money and then they didn't find money.
And then Shields says Ed Brown took the lamp and poured oil and tried to burn the place to get rid of the evidence.
And that's why the lamp thing and the oil and the burnt clothing and possibly burnt cheek.
Right.
I just want to point this out.
According to, again, the sheriff and the confessions, Shields said he agreed to do this for $12.
Now keep in mind, this is 1934.
This is the Depression.
So $12 is actually like a bit of money, but I wanted to point that out because of stuff that happens later around money that I just think is really interesting.
But that's apparently the amount of money that someone would kill for is $12 here.
And then they say, S.H.I.E.L.D.
says, okay, he left and then waited for the other two and they never came.
And then the other two were like, no, we just went home.
Doesn't make any fucking sense, but we'll see why, obviously.
So, that next sheriff basically corroborates this.
There's not too many contradictions.
He just adds like a few little things that don't matter that much.
Confirms that the, you know, the confessions were definitely voluntary.
I was there.
They were totally voluntary.
The other sheriff told more about like how they moved the body to the seed room after and setting it on fire.
So they did add kind of different things there.
And they also added in how Ellington and Brown just, they felt so much better after confessing.
And then, but Shields didn't, which again, Shields was the one who pretty much maintained his innocence as much as possible.
Not even according to this white racist sheriff was he like relieved to tell the truth.
The second sheriff mentions a cotton check, and I was trying so hard to figure out exactly what this would mean, but there's not much else about it.
At first I was like, well, that can't be like a check, like a bank check, right?
Because these folks wouldn't have, I doubt they would have bank accounts, like sharecroppers and the black sharecroppers in the 30s.
But then I was researching and it's like, well, it doesn't necessarily have to be like a check check.
It could also be like a personal IOU, like that was also, and there's some other forms of like IOU that you could even take into town and use at a store.
You know, like there's different ways that, you know.
So the alleged motivation is that one of the gentlemen was stiffed by Raymond Stewart.
Like they didn't, didn't get the money for work that he had done around the cotton thing, but it's like, it's extraordinarily bad.
You would think you'd need to establish a motive, but I think in the eyes of white people in Mississippi in 1934, just being like, they wanted money was pretty much, okay.
They're black and they wanted money.
Got it.
Done.
It's pretty much, that's all they felt they needed to establish.
And then, like I said, they have Reverend Eugene Stevens testify and corroborate all that.
I want to read a tiny bit from there.
Question.
During all the time you were there, were any threats or anything like that used against these boys?
There absolutely wasn't.
And besides that, they were told we were there to protect them and we're going to see that they had a fair trial and for them to feel easy.
Were they told that they would be given any kind of immunity from what they told or did?
No, sir.
Were their statements free and voluntary on their part?
I don't see why they shouldn't be.
That's an interesting response.
Yeah.
Just another thing I wanted to point out again with all the content notes, re-upping those.
Just one random sentence where he's talking about like how they entered the house.
And he says, the two darkies, Shields and Ellington, went in a side entrance by a chimney, I think.
He, I guess meaning Brown, went around and waited in the hall and met them there.
But it's, I just found that interesting.
Like Ed Brown must be a lighter skinned black man.
And like he refers to the other two.
And this is a reverend, by the way.
Yeah, a man of the cloth.
Yeah, reverend says the two darkies over there, Shields and Ellington, which is, I just found that interesting.
Like that kind of colorism, you know, like even among these racist white people, they're pointing out that colorism and noting like the.
Yeah, exactly.
I just found that like, again, there's so many little tidbits that you're like, God, just get a picture of what the fuck this horrible place in time was.
And that's basically it for the state's case.
The state rests after that.
Seriously?
Yep, the state rests.
It was like a two hour.
It could have been less.
It probably took me longer to say what happened than what happened.
I could have just probably should have read the whole transcript.
No, there is some stuff.
Sorry, that's nuts for three defendants that are being considered for the death penalty.
Well, in their minds, they confess.
So that's they just basically, Stennis thought, well, they confessed.
I just need to establish that they confessed.
And I just need this guy and his brother.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
These people will say that it was totally free and voluntary.
Bam.
Done.
And at this point, I was thinking, ah, shit, that's how, okay, so that's how this happened.
The jury didn't hear much about the confessions because they were out of the room and like, yeah, okay, they heard.
The above board version.
Yeah, yeah, and that's, fuck, okay, that's how this happened.
But we're not even close to done with the trial transcript.
We're, we've got a lot to go.
In fact, there's so much more.
I think I'm gonna call a bit of an audible here and trying to arrange these in the best way we can.
Yeah.
There's sort of some odds and ends here we can talk about because the next part is very long.
So I think that'll be part three in terms of the rest of the transcript.
But I wanted to, I can't help it.
I wanted to think a little bit about, look, I know, you know, literally everybody then knew that these confessions were bullshit.
Like, obviously.
And so there is always the thing of like, you see it with Trump too, where you're like, well, we all know this is a lie, but you still can't help debunking it, you know?
You're just like, I don't know if anyone believes this, but I can't help thinking about it.
And there is a part of me that even though this is a 1934 murder case and it's almost impossible to know what happened and there's so little information, a little part of me that can't help try to think about like, what did happen here?
You know?
Because the guy was murdered.
Like that is real.
Raymond Stewart was murdered.
Yeah.
And I'm reading these alleged confessions that I've just told you about, and like, I'm poking holes in it.
The one element of true crime, and I get why people are so into it, I do love the mystery part of it, like detaching from all of it.
I love the logical puzzle, and I do, I'm poking holes in this thing, but you also have to Remember that you can't poke a hole in it that couldn't be filled because again, somebody killed him.
And I see that a lot where it's like throwing spaghetti at the wall is to try to debunk like any story.
And it's like, well, then that would, that would mean nobody killed.
Like you've just debunked, you've over bunked, completely debunked.
You got to leave some bunk in there.
And so I have some thoughts about it and a few more details about the alleged confessions.
But I also, one of the main points I wanted to make is, I mean, essentially all three of these guys are sharecroppers, I think.
I don't have that much detail about Henry Shields.
So Ed Brown was kind of the closest with Raymond Stewart and was literally a sharecropper, lived pretty close to his house, but on his property.
Pretty close relationship there.
Yeah.
Yank Ellington lived further away.
It's said that he didn't work with Raymond as much, but it does seem like it's because he kind of had his own station out there, maybe, like he had his own kind of mules or something.
Not his, obviously.
No black person owns fucking anything in this world, but they're like Raymond Stewart's mules.
And it seems like he does more work further away, but it's still like work for Raymond Stewart.
Shields, and this is a little interesting detail.
I might've mentioned this earlier, but Shields is the one that says he's lived with a number of people.
So maybe he's like kind of share cropped around, you know, a little bit.
Right.
Okay.
And one of them is Henry Lavender.
And I found that interesting.
Hmm.
But I guess not presently because we covered he lived on Mrs. Etheridge's property.
It does seem like, I don't know if he was technically sharecropping, not enough information.
There is reference made to like him working for them, but it might've been, you know, some different kind of thing.
In another capacity.
Yeah, I don't know.
So anyway, starting with that information, you looked a little bit into just sharecropping in general.
Yeah, so when slavery ended, enslaved people didn't have their own land.
They didn't have anything.
They didn't have anywhere to go.
And the slave owners, the slaveholders, simultaneously had now these huge expanses of land and crops and no one to work them.
And they could not wrap their minds around how to harvest.
Without slaves, I guess.
So they came up with this system that had been used a little bit before the Civil War had started, but it really just boomed here, where they said, how can we exploit people without enslaving them?
Not allowed to do slavery, but can we pay you zero dollars to do all the work?
Yes.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, literally, infrequently was anyone offered any money.
It was usually trading your labor for a share of the crops, hence sharecroppers.
You did not own, as a black person, you did not own any of the animals you needed to work the land.
You didn't own any of the tools.
You didn't own seeds.
You didn't own any housing.
Nothing.
The folks who did own the land, the landowners, maintained the books the entire time.
And you're talking about a generation, multiple generations of people who might be illiterate because they didn't have the opportunity to pursue any education while they were enslaved.
Is the landowner being truthful?
How am I doing with, you know, what I'm making, quote-unquote, through this?
And so, by the way, maybe someone did have a complaint.
I'm sure they had a complaint against him for, or could have.
There's no evidence for Ed Brown.
There is some evidence for, like, Yank, I think, might have had a disagreement, allegedly, but more on that later.
So the tools that they needed to work the land, the seeds, everything like that, it wasn't like the landowner offered those up out of the goodness of their heart to work their crop on their property.
Sharecroppers often would have to rent those items from the landlord and then pay back with high interest rates.
And so you have this situation where individuals are never able to get out.
They're enslaved again.
I was going to say, so it's almost like slavery is what you're saying.
Yeah, it's basically the exact same thing, except now there's like a ledger that they're writing down numbers in.
So I found actually like an older contract.
It's not from the 30s, but I thought it was pretty interesting.
It's from 1867.
Like one of the first ones.
Yeah, yeah.
The said Cooper Hughes Friedman with his—Friedman, of course—with his wife and one other woman, and the said Charles Roberts with his wife Hannah and one boy, are to work on said farm and to cultivate 40 acres in corn and 20 acres in cotton, to assist in putting the fences on said farm in good order, and to keep them so and to do all other work on said farm necessary to be done to keep the same in good order and to raise a good crop and to be under the control and directions
of said I.G. Bailey, and to receive for their said services one half of the cotton and one-third of the corn and fodder raised by them on said farm in said year 1867.
And the said Charles Roberts Friedman with his wife Hannah further agrees and binds themselves to do the washing and ironing and all other necessary housework for said I.G. Bailey and his family during said year 1867, and to receive for their said services $50 in money at the expiration of said year and to receive for their said services $50 in money $50 in 1867.
You want to take a guess on how much that would be in 2023?
in 1867.
You want to take a guess on how much that would be in 2023?
Like $57.
You lowballed it a little bit.
No, it's like $1,000.
Oh, okay.
So can you imagine doing all of that work for $1,000?
Meanwhile, you're paying rent on all the things that you need to do to do all this work for them?
I was going to say, I was doubting that he would even end up with that money.
It would be probably deducted off of other things.
Oh, yeah.
No, they probably wouldn't.
And so a lot of times, if you weren't able to pay your debt based off of what you were supposedly earning versus what you rented and what you owed to the landowner, often they would say, oh, just work the next season for me towards your debt, right?
And then you have this indebted servitude going on here.
And so, you know, I could sit here and kind of share stats and figures and everything, but I actually stumbled on a documentary that I think does a little more justice that I'd like you to play.
Just a little clip from.
What an age we live in.
1960.
Yeah, from CBS News.
Watch something that went crazy.
All right.
Aileen King, I saw your children yesterday at the Okeechobee camp.
Why didn't you put them in the nursery?
I don't make enough to pay for it.
How much does it cost to put them in?
Eighty-five cents.
Eighty-five cents.
That's right.
Elaine, what time did you come out to field this morning?
Six o'clock.
What time would you get home?
About three-thirty, four o'clock.
Six this morning to four o'clock this afternoon.
That's right.
How much did you earn?
A dollar.
One dollar?
That's right.
One dollar.
Is that because the beans were of poor quality?
That's right.
Has this happened before?
That's right.
Uh, how much will your food cost you today?
About two hours.
Aileen, how old are you?
Twenty-nine.
How many children do you have?
Fourteen.
Wow.
How old were you when you first started working in the fields?
Eight.
You've been working twenty-one years in the fields?
That's right.
Aileen, do you ever think you'll be able to get out of this kind of work?
No, sir.
Yeah.
Also, I mean, interestingly, that puts her starting work there around 1939.
I mean, how crazy is it that the period we're talking about, it seems so old-timey, but then it's like, oh, well, we can watch video footage of someone who was like, 21 years she'd been working there, starting when she was eight.
And it's like, yep, 1960, things were still not great.
Wow.
And I heard your reaction to how many kids she had, and my jaw literally dropped when I was listening to that.
Fourteen children by the age of 29.
And prior to this interview, he's actually chatting with her kids.
And I'm not playing that there, but it was very sad.
They basically just Stay at the house and try to take care of each other, and there's, you know, like, no food.
There was a hole in one of their beds, and he asked one of the sons, hey, where'd that hole come from?
And he said, well, the rats.
And just these conditions that they're living in, she made a dollar picking beans because they weren't deemed to be good enough quality, and food for the day is going to cost $2.
So, like, what kind of life is this?
It's not.
It's not a life.
Don't worry, it's okay because now we have illegal immigrants who we pay comparable amounts of money to do that work.
So we're all better now.
Yep.
So with that little detour on sharecropping, that brings me to something that has always bothered me about these stupid confessions.
Again, knowing that they're obviously bullshit, but it's still like even trying to figure out who, who done it.
It's always bothered me because, well, I'm going to actually read some of the testimony of the sheriff of the confession.
And this is Dennis questioning.
This is the first sheriff answering.
He says, Henry Shields said they met that afternoon sometime down the road.
He didn't undertake to say just where.
These boys, Ellington and Brown, told him they were going to kill Mr. Stewart for some money that he owed them for cotton checks that he wouldn't give them the money and that they were going to have it and they wanted him to help kill him.
He agreed to help them and they were to meet about midnight down at Ed Brown's house.
They did meet down there at Ed Brown's house and talked the matter over and left and went to Mr. Stewart's.
Henry Shields and Ellington went directly to the west end of the house by the chimney and the door to the bedroom where Mr. Stewart was sleeping.
Question, you say that they said Ellington and Henry Shields went in the residence by an entrance near the bedroom?
It is right by the chimney and there's a door there and the steps come up to the bedroom.
I asked them about the bed and they said it was over in the corner of the room and they could see his form in the bed.
Ellington said that Henry hit him the first lick with the stick, and Henry said Ellington hit the first lick.
Each one said the other made entrance to the room first.
Mr. Stewart jumped up or undertook to get up, Ellington said.
After the lick with the stick, he jumped up and Shields hit him with an axe.
He jumped up and said something.
They never did tell exactly what he said.
He undertook to go out the door into the hallway, and Shields struck a match and give it to him and told him to light a lamp.
Who did that?
S.H.I.E.L.D.S.
Ellington said that about S.H.I.E.L.D.S.
Ellington said S.H.I.E.L.D.S.
hit him with an axe and struck a match and told him to light a lamp and he followed him in the hallway and S.H.I.E.L.D.S.
hit him again with the axe and he ran after him with the light.
Mr. Stewart started out the end of the hall into another little entrance, I call it the back hall, and he met this Ed Brown.
He went around the house and came in the back and was in the hallway and had torn open a chest and secured a foot axe and he said he hit him with that.
Who did?
Ed Brown, S.H.I.E.L.D.
says, Yank hit him with a stick again and knocked the lamp chimney off.
Oh, I might have had that wrong by the way.
I thought they hit him with the lamp, but maybe the story is somebody knocked the lamp off.
About the time he fell against the tool chest.
When Ed Brown hit him, he fell.
Ellington said he hit him one or two licks with a chisel, a wood chisel with a wood handle, about eight inches long.
I saw that chisel there myself.
I asked them if they hit him with any more after he fell, and they said they didn't.
Shields and Ed Brown took the lamp and went in the house and he had the keys and unlocked the safe and looked in there and in the closet and all around for money, but he didn't find any money.
He came back there and Ellington Shields put the body in the cottonseed room.
The door was right at the end of the tool chest where the body fell across it.
He said he got down under the man's arm and pulled him up and his head was somewhere near.
Who did that?
Shields did that.
He said that himself, that he pulled him up and his head was right about there and he had his arms under the other man's arms and Ellington took So that's the bulk of it.
your legs and pushed the door open and dumped him on the pile.
Shield said Ed Brown took the lamp after he didn't find any money and poured the oil all around Mr. Stewart and on him and on the cotton seed.
He threw the lighted wick down there and he said he was going to burn him and the house up.
So that's the bulk of it.
There's a little more I'm going to read.
But like, it's always bothered me that how in the world these are three incredibly able bodied, hardworking, share fucking croppers.
One is 20, the others, they're not, none of them older than like 30, I think, I forget the exact age, but 20s and the 30s.
And you're telling me, A, they decided to get together and plot to do this.
And they're like, all right, what should we, what should we kill them with?
Well, I got a stick, Yeah.
An axe and then- Wood chisel.
Yeah, and a wood chisel.
Okay, cool.
Let's go do it.
They get around his sleeping body and they're like, all right, let's try the stick first.
You're like, what?
What in the, how would anyone take this seriously?
Yeah.
Mind you, I think I already mentioned that Ed Brown had Stewart's gun, like still to this time, like a shotgun that he just let him use all the time.
Why wouldn't the plot be, all right, we're going to kill him.
I've got a shotgun.
Okay.
Let's go shotgun him.
Yeah, that was my thought too.
Like, if he has a weapon already at his disposal and is also owned by the person that they're murdering, I mean... Yeah, and like, the other thing that really bothered me is like, you're telling me they tried to burn the house down and couldn't?
Yeah.
I imagine these men would be very competent with things like that.
They know the cotton crop.
They would know better than anybody how any of that shit would work, what would be flammable, what wouldn't.
Building fires, burning brush, doing all that kind of stuff, that's normal farm work.
That's stuff that they would be highly competent at.
So you're telling me three strong young black men, sharecroppers, couldn't even kill a guy who was sleeping.
Then they can't even burn down the house.
And then furthermore, if they were going to burn down the house, then that would make me think like the gun's an even better thing.
Like, I don't know how good forensics was, but it's like, yeah, shoot them and then burn it to a crisp.
And then, you know, you wouldn't be able to find anything.
Yeah.
None of that makes any fucking sense.
Here's another stupid part.
This part is unbelievably stupid.
This is still Stennis, by the way.
It's not like cross-examination.
"Question, what if anything was said about a jumper with blood on it?" "All I knew about it was what they told me." "Question, what did they say about it to you on that occasion?" "I asked them and Ed said that that was his jumper and he gave it to Henry down at the house and Henry admitted that.
Ed told him to put it on and he did.
When it was all over with, he took it off and threw it down by the chimney there at the bedroom." "At whose house?" At Mr. Stewart's.
He told me that he had another jumper on and Ed told him to put the old one on too.
Of course, I didn't know anything about the bloodstains on it.
Mr. Adcock, did either one of those boys say anything about the reason for the jumper being exchanged between them or anything like that?
Henry Shield said Ed Brown gave it to him and told him to put it on over his to keep off any bloodstains.
And they left that jumper there at Mr. Stewart's house?
Yes, sir.
That's what he said.
I asked him about it being found at his house, and he said he didn't know anything about that.
I asked him about the axe, and he said he didn't know anything about that.
This is still Stennis questioning his own witness.
Like, what?
He's like, oh, shit.
This so obviously and clearly reads like someone has fed them information about a jumper, and then they're trying to piece it in.
Like, yeah, no, he put it on Over his.
Then we did a little fashion show.
We each tried it on.
Saw how it looked.
Like, what the fuck are you talking about?
So, keep in mind how absolutely terrible all this is.
Here's the cross-examination by the absolutely definitely competent lawyers who are trying real hard.
Cross-examination by Mr. Spinks.
Mr. Adcock, did I understand you to say that each of the boys admitted they went to Mr. Stewart's house that night?
Yes, sir.
Did each one of them admit that they were present when Mr. Stewart was being attacked by one or the other of the three?
Yes sir, all were in the house, two in one room, and the other waiting at the end of the hall.
Question, for instance, when Ed Brown was undertaking to make his narration of what happened, was he interrupted and charged by either of the others telling a falsehood on either of the others?
No sir, Brown and Ellington both said that Henry had the axe and he denied it.
That is the axe they claimed he hit with and Henry denied hitting him at all.
Did they give sufficient description so that the axe was pictured in your mind?
Yes sir, I asked Henry to describe the axe and he said it was an axe with black letters on the side.
And near the axe, it was busted a little piece.
I asked him if it had a new handle and he said it was pretty new.
Did Henry admit to having the axe that night?
No sir.
He denied having it?
Yes sir.
What did he say about the axe?
I asked him if he had been confronted with an axe since he had been in jail, and he said he had.
I asked him if this was his jumper, and he said, yes, sir.
I asked him if it was the one he had on, and he said it was.
I asked him about the axe, and he denied having it.
He said he left it at home.
At this point, Mr. Dawes takes over.
A while ago, did I understand you to say that some of the three told you that they had a meeting the afternoon before the killing that night?
Yes, sir.
Which one was that?
All of them said they met in the road just before night.
How far was that from Stewart's home?
I don't think I ever asked that question, or that they ever told me.
It was down in the road somewhere, about a gate or near a gate.
I don't know anything about where it was.
Did they say they had a meeting that afternoon?
All three of them said that, and they said that their understanding was they would meet that night at Ed Brown's house.
Witness dismissed.
That's it.
That's the entirety of cross-examination of this incredibly key witness.
Nothing else.
Nothing like, are you telling me three strong men could not kill a man in bed?
Is that what you're telling me?
And an older man, right?
Yeah, he's older than 60s, I think.
What?
And then they also couldn't make a fire happen.
Yeah.
You know, and even though they have oil, like, yeah, like there's no rush.
It's not like there's a, you know, an alarm system and the cops are coming like, yeah, it's the middle of the night.
So, you know, I'm not going to spend too much time on the speculating, but I can't help but just wonder, like, what happened here?
You know, and there's well, there's a little more information you're going to get later.
But this strikes me as someone almost strikes me as like, could it have been a woman?
You know, it's like you've got somebody where They've got the jump on the guy and they've got an ax, but they're not able to kill him?
And I don't know, we don't get any real forensic information as to like, well, are we positive it's multiple people with weapons or one person with a series of weapons?
You know, we don't, we don't have any idea about that.
Cause like, I can imagine if it was a, I don't know about a woman or what, but just like someone weaker, someone not, you know, obviously strong and capable like these men were.
Yeah.
Then maybe it's like, You hit him, but he's not injured.
Like he's still kind of alive and making his way about the house.
And maybe you find other things to try to hit him with, you know, that makes a little more sense, you know, than like, for some reason you failed to kill a guy with an ax who's sleeping.
Like, I'm pretty sure if I wanted to kill somebody with an ax who was sleeping, I would do it in pretty much one go.
Like that wouldn't be hard at all.
Let alone if there was three of me or something like that's not happening.
Yeah, or like, at the very least, the injuries, because, I mean, he was quite injured, but he still managed to survive a significant number of hours after being horribly beaten.
And I feel like, yeah, like to your point, if you were really trying to kill somebody, you would get a little closer at least.
Yeah.
If you were one of those three.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I don't buy it.
Yeah, I really wonder what happened.
I will say, and more on this later, but the only person that I think could have been involved was Shields.
Maybe that could make sense.
Shields didn't have as much knowledge.
That's the other thing.
Brown would have known like whether or not he had money, where he kept it, how that was going to go.
Yeah.
The part where they didn't find any money is interesting.
That strikes me as like, well, maybe whoever did it actually did steal money.
But because they couldn't find that money at any of the black guys places, they have to say he didn't have any, you know, like, yeah, maybe that's what's going on.
So I don't know, just in terms of the whodunit, there's no way it was Ed Brown.
Like, I don't think Ed Brown was at all involved.
I really don't.
There's also a thing that's interesting about how the confession went.
This is later.
Ed Brown hadn't been admitting anything, and then he finds out Shields had implicated him.
That then, Ed Brown said, oh, he's lying on me, he did it.
And, like, part of me's like, I don't, maybe he, maybe...
Shields did do it and like you know and then implicated but anyway or who knows who it was but I sure as shit know it was not three strong men who failed to kill a guy who was sleeping and then couldn't even burn down the place.
I don't understand why like there's no time pressure that I know of unless there's you know were there people There, someone in the house that we don't know about, some reason you would have had to hurry?
Because if I'm trying to burn down a house to hide evidence of a murder I committed, I'm making sure that thing burns down.
Yeah.
We don't have any witnesses, any eyewitnesses who said they chased anyone off or did anything, you know?
So what a weird thing.
I don't know.
Somebody did it, but it feels like somebody who is not capable, not as competent as these men definitely would be.
Right.
Interesting.
Right.
Hmm.
That's all speculative and, you know, we can continue speculating if we want.
But what is not at all speculative is that these confessions were problematic, to say the least.
And so next time on Where There's Woke, the state has rested its case, or has it?
