telling you one thing: I ain’t going to take no one’s woman, Jesus Christ, especially a white woman, you kidding? I’ve got more sense than that, Jesus Christ.”
“But still, the woman was lying on the floor, wasn’t she?”
“No sir—”
“What?”
“That woman wasn’t touched when I left there, no sirree. If I touched that woman do you think I’d be still messing around here? Are you kidding? I ain’t touched no woman. Maybe somebody come by after I left.”
“You have something more to tell us, you’re holding something back.”
“All right, then, you say I got something to tell you. Then all right. I ain’t got nothing.”
“Roy, let’s have it.”
“All right,” Smith says. “Go ahead, have it.”
For a black man in a police station in 1963 to speak sarcastically to his interrogators regarding the rape and murder of a white woman must have been rare indeed, even in Massachusetts. Back home in Mississippi it could have gotten him killed. “You’ve been lying all afternoon here, for the last half hour,” said Maguire. “Now you’re smart enough to know that science is going to trip you up.”
“Not going to trip me up.”
“So why don’t you start now and give us the right story and get it off your mind? It’s bothering you.”
“Nothing bothering me myself because—I ain’t did nothing and I’m not afraid of nothing myself. Y’all do just whatever you want but I’m telling you I ain’t did nothing.”
At this point Smith asked Chief Robinson for a cigarette, who gave him one. Maguire took the opportunity to interject, “Get it off your chest, Roy, let’s have it.”
“I’m not no Strangler here, are you kidding?” Smith said. “Shit.”
There must have been silence in the room. There must have been glances between the police officers. “Who said anything about being the Strangler?” Maguire finally said.
“That’s what ya’ll are trying to put on me. I seen that guy from the paper up there, people taking all the pictures and stuff out there, putting me on TV—you go ahead on and try to prove that stuff, go ahead on—”
“We will prove it.”
“Go ahead, do anything you want,” Smith said. “You know better than that. Me, I don’t go around and kill somebody.”
The interrogation of Roy Smith went on into the early hours of March 13. After twelve hours of questioning, Smith still refused to admit his guilt, and the police had no choice but to let the district attorney take over. In the meantime, an ambitious young Boston lawyer named Beryl Cohen agreed to take Smith’s case pro bono. Cohen had been alerted to Smith’s plight by a reporter friend of his named Gene Pell, who had staked out the Belmont police station for what was supposed to be a Boston Strangler story. As the hours dragged by, though, Pell had started to worry that Smith’s legal rights were not being protected, and so he called Cohen, who in turn tracked down Dorothy Hunt. It was Hunt who gave Cohen the go-ahead to represent Smith.
On March 21 a Middlesex County grand jury found that Roy Smith “did assault and beat Bessie Goldberg with intent to kill and murder her, and by such assault and beating did kill and murder said Bessie Goldberg.” He was not charged with any of the other Boston stranglings because he had been in prison for most of the previous year and could not have committed them. When asked by the judge how he pleaded, Smith answered in a strong, clear voice, “I plead mute.” (Pleading mute was a way for Smith to avoid admitting guilt while still keeping his options open.) Smith was remanded to Bridgewater State Prison for psychiatric observation, and a trial date was set for the following November.
L.C. MANNING SITS in a trash-filled pickup truck in his driveway in Oxford, Mississippi, sweating in the heavy April heat. In the late fifties he was arrested by Sheriff Boyce Bratton for public drinking and wound up in the Oxford City jail, where he got into a fight with another inmate. Not only did the other inmate lose the fight, but he was also white, for which Manning spent a year’s forced labor at Parchman Farm. He was there about a decade after Roy, though things hadn’t changed much. Manning has big wide hands that sit obediently on his lap when he talks, and powerful shoulders that must have served him well when he was young. They must have served him well in prison. Manning is old enough to remember when Roy got arrested for stealing cotton. Manning is old enough to remember Oxford’s last lynching. Manning is old enough to remember getting flogged by a white man. Parchman was bad, he says but so was everything else. It didn’t begin and end at the prison gate.
“Oh, man, you don’t know shit,” he says, shaking his head. Manning lives in a patched-together house on the outskirts of Oxford. There is a toolshed in Manning’s backyard made entirely of discarded wooden doors. “It were hell down there, that’s why I don’t take no shit now. If I go again I want to go for something I actually did. But with the help of Jesus and God I seen ’em all go down below. I ain’t jokin’—Bratton, Old Judge McElroy, all of ’em, and thank Jesus I still here. Three people you put your trust in: Jesus, the Lord, and yourself. Trust no man.”
Parchman occupies forty-six square miles of snake-infested bayous and flatlands in the Yazoo Delta, which stretches along the Mississippi River from Vicksburg to Memphis and east to the Chickasaw Ridge. Parts of the farm were blessed with rich alluvial soil known as “buckshot” that ran up to fifty feet deep, and other parts were so swampy and tangled that they had turned back Union troops toward the end of the Civil War. The prison had no fence around it because it was too big and no central cell blocks because the inmates were distributed around the plantation in work camps. Every morning at four thirty, the inmates were woken up by a bell and marched out to the fields, where they worked from sunup until sundown. The plowing was done by mule, and the picking was done by hand. At dark the men marched back to the work camp and ate a dinner prepared by other inmates. Every work camp had a vegetable garden and livestock pen, and the inmates subsisted almost entirely off what they could grow and raise. After dinner the lights were turned out and the men went to sleep, and at four thirty the next morning it started all over again. There were men who passed their entire lives that way.
Flogging was the primary method of enforcing discipline at Parchman and was not officially banned until 1971. A leather strap known as Black Annie was used liberally on anyone who would not work, anyone who disobeyed a direct order, anyone who displayed anything approaching impudence. An escape attempt merited something called a “whipping without limits,” which—since there was virtually no medical care at Parchman in the early days—was effectively a death sentence. Inmates also died in knife fights, died in their bunk beds of malaria and pneumonia and tuberculosis, and sometimes just dropped dead of heatstroke in the fields. It was the closest thing to slavery that the South had seen since the Civil War.
The result of this relentless brutality was that Parchman was almost completely self-sufficient—and extremely profitable. In addition to growing food to eat and cotton to sell, the inmates also maintained a brickworks, a sawmill, a cotton gin, a sewing shop, a slaughterhouse, a shoe shop, a machine shop, and a thirty-man carpentry crew on the farm. During Roy’s time Parchman was turning a profit of around a million dollars a year, mostly from cotton
