Detective Story

Somewhat shamefaced, Mississippi Sheriff George Smith Marshall admitted that his boys had made a slight mistake: four Negroes who had been held in Sunflower County jail were just not guilty of the murder to which three of them had confessed. They confessed, the sheriff reckoned, after "a small amount of heat." What kind of heat? "I imagine they probably used a leather strap," the sheriff said.

That was not the half of it. It all started a couple of weeks ago, when a Negro woman reported that her 17-year-old boy, Robert McKinney, had disappeared and had probably been murdered. Sheriff Marshall was too busy, so he turned everything over to a go-getting private detective named Charles R. Underwood.

"Yassuh, Yassuh." The first thing Underwood did, with the help of Deputy Sheriff Homer Sheffield, was to round up 30 Negroes. He finally narrowed his suspects down to four, then herded them into the sheriff's back room. As Sheriff Marshall explained: "I was not there, but about 9 or 10 o'clock, after some heat probably had been applied to try to get the truth, one of them said, 'Yassuh, yassuh, we hit him in the head.'" Underwood got "confessions" signed by three of the prisoners--Jesse James Jr., Amos Redmond and Jesse Davis--admitting they had lured McKinney from a juke joint, robbed him of $40, bashed in his head and thrown his body in the Sunflower River. The fourth prisoner, Willie Galloway, refused to sign.

That same afternoon, McKinney's mother appeared at the courthouse with disconcerting news: her son wasn't dead, he had turned up in East St. Louis. A quick long-distance call confirmed her story. McKinney knew all the men who had "confessed" to killing him; in fact, he had cleaned them out in a crap game the night he left Indianola, and used his profits to buy his bus ticket.

Wave of Shame. In the shocked silence that followed, Detective Underwood scurried back to his home in nearby Cleveland, Miss. Sheriff Marshall cleared his throat embarrassedly, said: "I don't know what I could do to Underwood. As for Sheffield, he's only been with the office a few months." But then the storm broke and the whole ugly story came out. A doctor reported that all four Negroes had been brutally beaten across the buttocks; two were unable to return to work after they were released from jail. Galloway was sent to the hospital ("I told them I had told the truth whether they killed me or not. They stopped beating me after about a half hour").

The Indianola Chamber of Commerce called a special meeting and an officer said "a wave of disgust, indignation and shame" had swept the town. In the face of such civic outrage, slow-moving Sheriff Marshall decided to fire Deputy Sheffield after all. Newsmen began looking into the background of Private Eye Underwood. They discovered he had been given a three-year sentence for the stickup of a Chicago bottling firm in 1947, and was wanted as a parole violator. He was slapped into jail, protesting that he would "rather die" than go back to Chicago.

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