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Speaker 7: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 7: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 7: written about Them, Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 7: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 7: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with Your
Speaker 7: host journalist and author Dan Zupanski good Evening, A reign
Speaker 7: of terror swept the streets of Birmingham in the nineteen twenties.
Speaker 7: Criminals armed with small axes attacked immigrant merchants and interracial couples,
Speaker 7: leaving dozens dead or injured over the course of four years.
Speaker 7: Desperate for answers, police accepted clues from a Ouiji board,
Speaker 7: while citizens clamored for gun permits for protection. The city's
Speaker 7: Italian immigrants formed their own association as protection against the
Speaker 7: Black Hand, an organized band of brutal criminals. Eventually, the
Speaker 7: police turned to a dangerous and untested truth serum to
Speaker 7: illicit confessions. Four black men and a teenaged girl were
Speaker 7: charged and tried, while copycat killers emerged from the woodwork.
Speaker 7: Journalist Jeremy Gray tackles one of the most curious and
Speaker 7: violent cases in Magic City history. The book they were
Speaker 7: featuring this evening is the infamous Birmingham Axe Murders, Prohibition
Speaker 7: Gangsters and Vigilante Justice with my special guest, journalist and
Speaker 7: author Jeremy W.
Speaker 4: Gray. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much
Speaker 4: for a greens this interview. Jeremy W.
Speaker 8: Gray, wonderful to be here, Thank you for having me.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much. Incredible story and thank you for
Speaker 4: bringing it to our audience. Attention. Now, you start this
Speaker 4: story in December fourteenth, nineteen nineteen, but there is a
Speaker 4: background that you a little bit later in the book.
Speaker 4: You talk about Birmingham itself at that time and also
Speaker 4: the makeup of the city in terms of African American
Speaker 4: population and Italian immigrants. So tell us just a little
Speaker 4: bit about first about Birmingham and the state of it
Speaker 4: and in the population, tell us a little bit about Birmingham, Alabama.
Speaker 8: Sure, Birmingham is a very young city. It's incorporated in
Speaker 8: eighteen seventy one, several years after the end of the
Speaker 8: Civil War. Birmingham, according to historian Wayne Flint, is the
Speaker 8: only city in America, even outside of Pittsburgh, where you
Speaker 8: have everything you need to make steel. And so it's
Speaker 8: the height of the Industrial Revolution. This is the place
Speaker 8: to be. So it just emerges out of nothing literally
Speaker 8: and by nineteen twenty the population has grown exponentially to
Speaker 8: one hundred and seventy eight thousand. It's attracted white farmers, sharecroppers,
Speaker 8: black shared croppers from the fields of Alabama. It's also
Speaker 8: attracted immigrants from all over the world. And so here
Speaker 8: in the middle of the South, which is predominantly for Protestant,
Speaker 8: you know, White Anglo Saxon Protestant and African American, you
Speaker 8: have this large cause of Politan growing community. And it's
Speaker 8: a hard lot. It's blue collar work, it's steel meal,
Speaker 8: it's coal mines, it's an arduous existence. And so along
Speaker 8: with that you have a lot of violence. And so
Speaker 8: if you have the city, it's growing extonationally, one of
Speaker 8: the fastest growing cities in the country. It's also one
Speaker 8: of the most violent.
Speaker 4: You talked about also, and as you do in the book,
Speaker 4: because of all of these things, confluence of events and
Speaker 4: groups that you talk about the Klan at that time,
Speaker 4: the Ku Klux Klan, So tell us about its presence
Speaker 4: there and it's importance you talk about later we talk
Speaker 4: about the police chief even being a member, a proud member.
Speaker 4: So tell us just about the influence of the Klan
Speaker 4: at that time. It's importance there.
Speaker 8: At that time. In the nineteen twenties, the Klan in
Speaker 8: several parts of America experience a resurgence after the silent
Speaker 8: movie The Birth of the Nation. You see claverns that
Speaker 8: that's the name for plan groups springing up oliver the Nation.
Speaker 8: In Birmingham there is the Robert E. Lee Claborn named after,
Speaker 8: of course, the same to Frederick General and it is
Speaker 8: said to be one of the largest in the nation.
Speaker 8: And Atlanta, Georgia, was probably the clan capital at that time,
Speaker 8: but Birmingham was a very close second. And it was said,
Speaker 8: according to multiple historical experts that pretty much every member
Speaker 8: of the Birmingham Police Department was a member of the clan,
Speaker 8: and including and also the sheriffs. The elected sheriff for
Speaker 8: the county was said to be a clan member, probably
Speaker 8: upwards of ten thousand members, and had very much regular power.
Speaker 8: A lot of what their focus was wasn't so much
Speaker 8: about racial things. It was about what they can center morality.
Speaker 8: One time someone mistreated their mother a property dispute, so
Speaker 8: they dragged them out of this house and whipped him.
Speaker 8: A Chinese restaurant had a gambling operations. They dragged those
Speaker 8: people out and whipped them. It wasn't really what you
Speaker 8: would think of as a traditional plan activity, but it
Speaker 8: was very prevalent during the time of the acts murders.
Speaker 4: Before we get into any of the details of those murders,
Speaker 4: you also I would like to get to get you
Speaker 4: to tell us about the state of the Italian population,
Speaker 4: the Italian immigrants, where they were originally from, and also
Speaker 4: the clan treatment of Italians and why.
Speaker 8: All Right, near as I can tell, a lot of
Speaker 8: the Italians made up the largest immigrant group in Jefferson County,
Speaker 8: the home county of Birmingham in the nineteen twenties. As
Speaker 8: near as I can tell, a lot of those came
Speaker 8: from Sicily, the southern part of Italy. Biasquiano. I forgive
Speaker 8: me if I've mispronounced that, which is a small rural community,
Speaker 8: and it just sort of became one of those things
Speaker 8: where while so and so went so, so and So's
Speaker 8: cousin is side, I'll go follow them, or so and
Speaker 8: So's brothers side, go follow them. They get to Alabama,
Speaker 8: they you know, as with so many immigrants, they come
Speaker 8: with hoping for the promise of better life for themselves
Speaker 8: and their family, and they find it, but they also
Speaker 8: find a discrimination. And since a lot of these Southern
Speaker 8: Italian folks they're darker skinned, they're treated basically the same
Speaker 8: as African Americans, which, of course, in nineteen twentis Alabamas
Speaker 8: is not so great. So you have congressmen Alabama probably
Speaker 8: publicly proclaiming that these immigrants are defiling in the white race,
Speaker 8: and you start seeing literacy test for voting and that
Speaker 8: sort of thing. And also because they're sort of a
Speaker 8: disenfranchised group, they don't really enjoyed police protection, so they're
Speaker 8: an easy group to target for robbery extortion, and then
Speaker 8: go to that they sort of band together and try
Speaker 8: to protect themselves, which leads to its own sets a
Speaker 8: set of problems.
Speaker 4: People know about this, but we could warrants mentioning again
Speaker 4: that these people had come from Sicily, and so they
Speaker 4: knew of people praying on them, namely the Black Hand.
Speaker 4: Tell us just a little bit about what they knew
Speaker 4: of the Black Hand from their experiences in life in Sicily.
Speaker 4: Tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 8: You know, I really I don't know what they might
Speaker 8: have known or not known. I just know from looking
Speaker 8: back at it. Wherever Italian immigrants lived not to cast
Speaker 8: dis versions on any one group of people. You would
Speaker 8: see groups of these Black Hand organizations pop up to
Speaker 8: pray primarily on Italians. They're fellow countrymen. I tell people,
Speaker 8: my book's not so much Friday the Thirteenth as it
Speaker 8: is that God saw them Part two. It's a small
Speaker 8: you know, small time thug praying on their fellow countrymen
Speaker 8: because they know they don't have anywhere to turn. In
Speaker 8: Chicago in the nineteen twenties, the Black Hand used bombs.
Speaker 8: There were multiple bombings of that killed people. It was extortion.
Speaker 8: Hey pay up, but we're gonna blow up your business.
Speaker 8: And there was also a black Hand enforcer known as
Speaker 8: a shotgun and in Chicago who just walked down the
Speaker 8: street with a shotgun over his shoulder and he just
Speaker 8: ran the streets. In New York City, there was a
Speaker 8: barrel murders and that's really how organized crime first came
Speaker 8: to be known in the United States. There were barrels
Speaker 8: found on the side of the road in New York
Speaker 8: City and it starts thinking up and it's made open
Speaker 8: them and there'd be some you know, poor crime victim
Speaker 8: inside and it was an extortion racket. It wasn't really
Speaker 8: one national syndicate the way we might think of the
Speaker 8: larger scale mafia of the forties and fifties and sixties.
Speaker 8: It was just fans of thugs who like, hey, we
Speaker 8: can extort people. And in Birmingham, I think that took
Speaker 8: the form of shopping people up with access.
Speaker 4: Now before December twenty fourth, nineteen nineteen, which chronicles the
Speaker 4: beginning of these reportedly of these axe murders, you also
Speaker 4: chronicle about case two months before and the axe Man
Speaker 4: of New Orleans and a man named Mike peppatone again
Speaker 4: his skull was crushed while he's in bed October seventeenth,
Speaker 4: nineteen nineteen, and that marked the end of an ax
Speaker 4: murder spree. You say that injured a dozen people, mostly
Speaker 4: Italian merchants. Why did you include this crime two months
Speaker 4: before and then tell and then from there tell us
Speaker 4: what happened December twenty fourth, nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 8: And one of the first things I hear when I
Speaker 8: when I discussed this case of people, especially people who
Speaker 8: are very interested in true crime, Hey, there were there
Speaker 8: acx murders in New Orleans. Is it possibly related to that?
Speaker 8: I don't think so. But I think it is worth noting.
Speaker 8: You know, it's in today. It's a five hour car
Speaker 8: I do from Birmingham to New Orleans. There's a train
Speaker 8: line that has been running folks from New Orleans to
Speaker 8: Birmingham to New York for one hundred years now. So
Speaker 8: it's not beyond the realm of possibility that someone was
Speaker 8: committing murders in New Orleans and then decided to start
Speaker 8: committing those murders in Birmingham instead. The New Orleans murders
Speaker 8: are much different. They target Italian merchants. That's another reason.
Speaker 8: It's the same sort of class of people group of people. However,
Speaker 8: in those cases, the axe man chopped through the doors,
Speaker 8: killed the people in their sleep, killed kids. That's not
Speaker 8: what happened in Birmingham and Birmingham. The ax man and
Speaker 8: the merchant murders would come in and say, hey, I
Speaker 8: want some oranges, want some cigarettes. He would bend down
Speaker 8: to pick up the cigarettes, or you'd turn around to
Speaker 8: get the oranges and the axe man would chop you
Speaker 8: in the head. So it was very much different. You
Speaker 8: know the fact that eight weeks passed between the end
Speaker 8: of one crime spree and the other, the fact they
Speaker 8: both targeted Italian communities in the foul. I thought it
Speaker 8: was worth noting. I think there's probably three paragraphs in
Speaker 8: the entire book about New Orleans, but I think it
Speaker 8: would have been not to acknowledge it in some way.
Speaker 4: You talk about the first to murder, about John H. Belzer,
Speaker 4: and you say that in the general story was attacked
Speaker 4: as he turned his head to serve some customers, and
Speaker 4: he was attacked, and you say police had no leads
Speaker 4: in the attack. And then it vanished from memory for
Speaker 4: more than a year. But then March fifteenth, nineteen twenty one, C. C.
Speaker 4: Pipkins was attacked at his grocery store. Tell us about
Speaker 4: this attack and what witnesses claim to have seen or
Speaker 4: who they've seen.
Speaker 8: Oh, and that went up.
Speaker 7: There were.
Speaker 8: Money from the scene. You know, there was a I
Speaker 8: question whether the first murder is actually associated with any
Speaker 8: of these. I think it may have been an unsault
Speaker 8: case that was just linked to it. And then they
Speaker 8: resume in nineteen twenty one with the Pipkin's case. It
Speaker 8: doesn't give us a lot of attention. A man's assaulted
Speaker 8: in the store on March fifth, nineteen twenty one. Two
Speaker 8: men hit him in the head with an axe and
Speaker 8: two customers scare the culprits away, and then we have
Speaker 8: another series, another case just a few months later in
Speaker 8: July of nineteen twenty one, where a family in a
Speaker 8: grocery store, A man, a woman, and a teenage girl
Speaker 8: are attacked. A nail is pounded into a woman's head,
Speaker 8: everybody survives. A milkman comes around these the kids running
Speaker 8: in blood and work the authorities. So from there it
Speaker 8: just starts picking up incrementally. We start with this one
Speaker 8: man getting assaulted, and we have the family getting assaulted,
Speaker 8: and by the end of nineteen twenty one there were
Speaker 8: seven injured and four murdered. And it's by the end
Speaker 8: of nineteen twenty one people really get the idea that hey,
Speaker 8: there's something going on here.
Speaker 4: Do you talk about the police reaction, their theory as
Speaker 4: to who is responsible for these crimes and then the
Speaker 4: very very interesting response by the media, and you talk
Speaker 4: about a newspaper called The Age Herald in Birmingham. So
Speaker 4: first time was about the police theory and then the
Speaker 4: media response.
Speaker 8: Well, the police theories varied in case the case, and
Speaker 8: some there was you know, we said there were maybe
Speaker 8: were straight up robbery, and some they said that the
Speaker 8: resident has had a beef with one of their neighbors
Speaker 8: or someone they rented property to. Some they said a
Speaker 8: person was involved in bootlegging, our selling of selling goods,
Speaker 8: and someone some other group of people, perhaps he's black hand.
Speaker 8: Organized crime groups knew about that and were blackmailing them,
Speaker 8: and when the blackmail didn't work, they were killing them.
Speaker 8: And then in the midst of all that, we also
Speaker 8: have a second set of crimes where an African American
Speaker 8: woman and a white man would be found in an alleyway,
Speaker 8: perhaps engaged prostitution, perhaps someone selling alcohol illicitly, this being
Speaker 8: prohibition to another person or elan and the seal of
Speaker 8: illegal drugs and someone killing them, and the police are
Speaker 8: pretty quick to say. And also the African American newspaper,
Speaker 8: the prominent black weekly paper, the Verman Air Report, was
Speaker 8: quick to say that those were the group of kids
Speaker 8: who were trying to prevent white men from having relations
Speaker 8: with black women. And so the news was quick to
Speaker 8: jump on all that these interracial stuff that came up
Speaker 8: a little bit later. So the Age Herald in January
Speaker 8: of nineteen twenty two, and this is an age where
Speaker 8: we have three daily newspapers, multiple weekly papers and you know,
Speaker 8: just pre television radios and its infancy. It's an old
Speaker 8: fashioned newspaper war. And so with the axe murders increasing
Speaker 8: in intensity and frequency in late nineteen twenty one, by
Speaker 8: nineteen twenty two, they're all over it, the Age Herald
Speaker 8: comes up with a crudely drawn racist care nature, assuming
Speaker 8: this sub such as black, the murderers black, and they
Speaker 8: call him Henry the Hacker, and they give him just
Speaker 8: sort of the basic racist caricature drawing uh and there's
Speaker 8: just tons of a recals. They devote two straight days
Speaker 8: of coverage to this. And at the same time, the
Speaker 8: plans marching through the street people that are going to
Speaker 8: the courthouse to get gun permits. Merchants are saying, hey,
Speaker 8: we're going to form a group. We're going to hire people,
Speaker 8: the Italian immigrants, their formula protection organization where they're going
Speaker 8: to band together to chase out criminals that targets their
Speaker 8: the little countrymen. So the Age Herald really fans the flames.
Speaker 8: And I work for the Birmingham News the al al
Speaker 8: dot com. I've been there almost fifteen years, so were
Speaker 8: we were complicent in that too, But the Harold really
Speaker 8: stoked it for a while there.
Speaker 4: What did the police do with this is nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 4: What did police do with people though they suspected? How
Speaker 4: did they proceed with questioning and what were some of
Speaker 4: the things that they did to try to solve these cases?
Speaker 4: And was there any talk of any kind of link
Speaker 4: between any of these crimes despite again the racial overtones here,
Speaker 4: but also the immigrants that were killed in their shops
Speaker 4: or attacked in their shops. Tell us about any possible
Speaker 4: link that the police thought and how they proceeded.
Speaker 8: It began with sort of standard operating procedure of chasing
Speaker 8: down the leads in each one of these cases. It
Speaker 8: got more outlandish as time went on. In January of
Speaker 8: nineteen twenty two, someone mailed a to the Birmingham Police chief.
Speaker 8: He said that he and some friends had been playing
Speaker 8: with a wigi board, and the wigi board they'd asked
Speaker 8: the Wigi board who was committing the axe murders and
Speaker 8: it spelled out the name of a well known Birmingham criminal.
Speaker 8: The letter writer said he didn't know who this man was.
Speaker 8: They didn't share in the name of the newspaper. One
Speaker 8: of the h Harold articles that I mentioned earlier. The
Speaker 8: police sent out detectives looking for this man identified through
Speaker 8: the Ouiji board. What really ultimately broke the case, so
Speaker 8: to speak, was it when they rounded up the suspects
Speaker 8: and two of the murders, just two of them out
Speaker 8: about twenty They there beside the people's four men, one
Speaker 8: teenage girl, a nineteen year old woman, and they took
Speaker 8: them out of their jail sales late at night and
Speaker 8: led him to a doctor's office and they shot him
Speaker 8: up with a mixture of drugs morphine and stapalo mine.
Speaker 8: This was a drug cocktail used on women who were
Speaker 8: getting birth. A doctor in Texas, Robert House, in the
Speaker 8: early twenties, noticed that whenever women were injected with his drugs,
Speaker 8: their loose, their lips got really loose, you know, they
Speaker 8: would tell you anything. And so he thought maybe this
Speaker 8: would fall some crimes, and so he, you know, pouted
Speaker 8: it with some law enforcing agencies in Texas. Anybody would listen.
Speaker 8: He was going around selling it. I don't know that
Speaker 8: he was very involved in the Birmingham cases, but the
Speaker 8: doctors and the police and the prosecutors decided to give
Speaker 8: it a try, and it is crazy as that sounds.
Speaker 8: Dragging people out of their cells and shooting them up
Speaker 8: with drugs and then listening confessions. I mean is that
Speaker 8: it is literally torture in the eyes of the US Constitution.
Speaker 8: It was out lawed in nineteen sixty three in connection
Speaker 8: with a murder case in Cook County, Illinois, but the
Speaker 8: standard operating procedure for interrogating suspects in Birmingham, Alabama, or
Speaker 8: any other city in America in the nineteen twenties was
Speaker 8: just basically to beat someone until they told you what
Speaker 8: you wanted them to say. So it's kind of interesting
Speaker 8: that they this was a very scientific route. They thought, hey,
Speaker 8: we'll use these drugs and they'll tell us everything we
Speaker 8: want to know. And ultimately these five people are connected
Speaker 8: in one set of murders, a white man, John Robert Turner,
Speaker 8: and a woman, Lily Beal. But the police say, okay,
Speaker 8: well we got everybody, and they just were wrap it
Speaker 8: up with a neat even though it really makes no
Speaker 8: there's no way that all these people, and some of
Speaker 8: them were in prison when ers were committed. It just
Speaker 8: it's it's outlandish to think that these five people committed
Speaker 8: even more than one or two of these murders. It's
Speaker 8: even that.
Speaker 4: You talk about and we kind of skipped over it though,
Speaker 4: because of this increasing fear and stoked by the media,
Speaker 4: sensationalistic media that took liberty with facts and with the
Speaker 4: clan and with you know, you say, the police force
Speaker 4: being openly clan members and this pressure. You also talk
Speaker 4: about though, that there was a theory by police that
Speaker 4: there was this vigilante band of negroes that was responsible.
Speaker 4: So before when they talked about the Truth serum, that
Speaker 4: there were critics at the time of the Truth series
Speaker 4: and what it would mean, but also interestingly, the police
Speaker 4: and the media herald it, as you say, much more
Speaker 4: civil than the way they elicited confessions before that, and
Speaker 4: it was almost like the recent East Area rapist development
Speaker 4: where now everybody's going to be taking familiar DNA and
Speaker 4: doing testing on cold cases. It really was harald as
Speaker 4: an innovation that would just as important as fingerprinting and
Speaker 4: that every other police force would be interested in and
Speaker 4: in fact, very much like we'd see in modern day.
Speaker 4: Many police jurisdictions asked the advice of Birmingham Police detectives
Speaker 4: as to end the doctor, as to how to use
Speaker 4: this truth serum to elicit confessions and use it for investigations,
Speaker 4: didn't they sure?
Speaker 8: Sure they thought that it would be a method that
Speaker 8: would be replicated in police departments around the country. I
Speaker 8: don't see any evidence of that happening. I think there
Speaker 8: are cases sporadically here and there. The CIA several years
Speaker 8: ago released a report that they wrote in the nineteen
Speaker 8: nineties just detelling how true serves were used in law
Speaker 8: enforcement and intelligence scattering to some degree, and it's specifically
Speaker 8: references to drugs, to palamone, and it makes mention that
Speaker 8: it's not effective because when you're shot up with this
Speaker 8: number one, your mouth goit is just completely dry, which
Speaker 8: makes it difficult to talk, you have hallucinations. It's just
Speaker 8: is not effective. So it just really wasn't It wasn't
Speaker 8: an effective way of prosecuting cases. And even in the
Speaker 8: Birmingham cases there were questions as to whether the confessions
Speaker 8: would be used. What they did is they took the
Speaker 8: confessions and tried to find evidence to supplement it.
Speaker 4: You talk about to counter the criticism from the questioning
Speaker 4: with this truth serum, they said that because they were
Speaker 4: described by people as done in the in the night
Speaker 4: because you say, one of the journalists that was touting
Speaker 4: it wanted as part of the research to really witness
Speaker 4: some of these. So he didn't witness the ones in Birmingham,
Speaker 4: but he witnessed other druggings using this drug in other places.
Speaker 4: And then he reported that they were done in the
Speaker 4: middle of the night. So to counter that, you talk
Speaker 4: about how they would do it in the day and
Speaker 4: ask these same questions. But as a result, there was
Speaker 4: some different tell us about those results once they had
Speaker 4: done that same test using that truth serum in daylight questioning.
Speaker 8: Well, the gentleman question was kind of the the start
Speaker 8: evant who was the bureau chief for one of the
Speaker 8: wire services in the South and interesting fellow was a
Speaker 8: thudling journalist and very successful and then he went into
Speaker 8: the drive in movie business later on in line he
Speaker 8: left journalism all behind and open drive in theaters all
Speaker 8: over the South, all over California in the Southwest, and
Speaker 8: he I think they give out awards in his name
Speaker 8: in the movie theater industry now. But he flashed onto
Speaker 8: this and he would go around as he found cases
Speaker 8: where they used this true erum. He actually had the
Speaker 8: true thereum used on himself but he he didn't witness
Speaker 8: to Birmingham win, but he got the notes. Supposedly they
Speaker 8: did it tonight, so supposedly they did it during the day.
Speaker 8: The results there's a complicting news report, so it's hard
Speaker 8: to say, you know which what they got win. But
Speaker 8: the prosecutors maintained that they said the same things in
Speaker 8: different setting and individually, and then they cooperated it. But
Speaker 8: it's it's not anything where I would think due process
Speaker 8: was honored or recognized. But it's hard to take it
Speaker 8: with any brain assault or with any without a brain
Speaker 8: support as ault.
Speaker 4: It's it's interesting too because you include those Again, I
Speaker 4: guess portions of what this stirt event was was told
Speaker 4: or someone that witnessed the Birmingham druggings was had to say.
Speaker 4: But the small portions that you do present really don't
Speaker 4: give any weight to the prosecution or the doctor with
Speaker 4: this drug itself and its effectiveness.
Speaker 8: Right, it's are Dan, Yeah, it's it's Preadan. I you know,
Speaker 8: I think it's possible that these five convicted people participated
Speaker 8: in the two murders. It's absolutely possible because there was
Speaker 8: at least one person who testified to having here been
Speaker 8: there with them right before the murder and been there
Speaker 8: when they came back from the murder and testified with
Speaker 8: some detail. It's possible, but without what is undisputable indisputable
Speaker 8: me is that they were not granted their constitutional rights
Speaker 8: the two processes.
Speaker 4: Certainly, you also talk about that the t in nineteen
Speaker 4: pardon me, that they talked about ending this murder spree.
Speaker 4: So they predicted that there would be the end of
Speaker 4: these acts murders, and so what it coincided with was
Speaker 4: this convenient truth serum that was was reliable, so that
Speaker 4: a confluence of events happened with the panic in the
Speaker 4: city over these murders, these unsolved murders, and then these
Speaker 4: suspects and the true serum, and then the prediction that
Speaker 4: these acts murders would end, and that this with the
Speaker 4: arrest of these people, that these things would go away.
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Speaker 4: Breakout Games dot com. Now when we least off, Jeremy,
Speaker 4: when we were last talked, we were talking about the
Speaker 4: You say that the True serum, you doubted that its effectiveness,
Speaker 4: and I mentioned that there were people that were critical
Speaker 4: of it, but they had some suspects. And then the
Speaker 4: sheriff and the media and everyone wanted and predicted the
Speaker 4: end of the Axe murders in Birmingham tell us about
Speaker 4: some of the cracks in the case. Despite everybody wanting
Speaker 4: this to happen, and this to be a conclusion. Some
Speaker 4: of the cracks in the case of the four accused.
Speaker 8: Well right before, right before the five were to stand trial.
Speaker 8: In nineteen twenty four, two men are found brutally assaulted
Speaker 8: in the streets of Birmingham on Saturday night. Two white
Speaker 8: men and Birmingham police come across a guy named Frank
Speaker 8: Owens and they see him. When they walk up all
Speaker 8: of these few patrol officers, he throws a max over
Speaker 8: the fence and he takes off. They chase him down,
Speaker 8: they get him. He puts up one hell of a fight.
Speaker 8: They finally get him wrangled. One officer goes to get
Speaker 8: the axe. Frank Owens, a black man who's later said
Speaker 8: to be very mentally ill, somehow gets away from the
Speaker 8: officer tries he isn't done. The two officers just have
Speaker 8: to beat the hell out of him, or said they
Speaker 8: had to beat the hell out of him, ripes inn
Speaker 8: and there to try to get him in the car.
Speaker 8: They get him in the car. They're driving them to
Speaker 8: the station. First out of the back of the car
Speaker 8: they run after him. They start firing shots, probably a
Speaker 8: dozen shots. One of them hit him in the arm.
Speaker 8: They take him, they get him. He says he was
Speaker 8: beaten during the interrogation. I don't doubt that. I don't
Speaker 8: have any reason. I don't have any evidence it is true,
Speaker 8: but I have no reason of doubt it either. He
Speaker 8: says that he was inspired by the axe murders and
Speaker 8: he was determined quote to cut down people in the
Speaker 8: fashion of the accident. And so what you have happening
Speaker 8: is when these five suspects for standing trial as the
Speaker 8: axe murderers, and people are saying, oh, well, we've got
Speaker 8: it all wrapped up. We have this guy who's like, hey, yeah,
Speaker 8: he's just carrying the torch. He's inspired by him. And
Speaker 8: also around the same time, you have the relatives of
Speaker 8: the victims who are still up in arms and two
Speaker 8: women who've been cut down. In a grocery store, the
Speaker 8: surviving son, brother of one of them, is working on
Speaker 8: Saturday night and he sees a black man he considers suspicious,
Speaker 8: and this Italian store ownery takes out his downe and
Speaker 8: shoots the guy. So even though the police are ready
Speaker 8: to wrap this up at a nice neat Ball and
Speaker 8: the press too. There's still a great deal of violence
Speaker 8: going on in the streets of Earlham.
Speaker 4: Can you talk about the first trial in February nineteen
Speaker 4: twenty four and one of the people is this a
Speaker 4: Glover and he is one of the people that you
Speaker 4: say in the interrogations with the drug with the truth serum,
Speaker 4: he seemed to know a lot less than the other
Speaker 4: people and at least in their claims under the drug
Speaker 4: and he took the stand in his own defense. Tell
Speaker 4: us about what he says about his attack on mister
Speaker 4: and missus Sparks and how that proceeds in that trial.
Speaker 8: Well, he, whoever, is the guy who's sort of the
Speaker 8: thread a lot of these crimes. In terms of the suspects.
Speaker 8: He is accused of attacking a man named Edwin Sparks
Speaker 8: and his wife. She's never fully identified other than being
Speaker 8: his wife. Supposedly, they're walking and a group of they're
Speaker 8: they're white of a group of black people grab them,
Speaker 8: tie him up, attack her and he's arrested. Mister Edwin's part,
Speaker 8: he's arrested and accused of assaulting his wife and he's like, no, no, no,
Speaker 8: it was this. It was this gang and his wife
Speaker 8: regains consciousness and she and she backs him up. He's
Speaker 8: also later on Fred Glove with the suspect. The one
Speaker 8: is identified. He's identified because he's a droopy I his
Speaker 8: gun had a blue barrel. He has had a lengthy
Speaker 8: criminal history. Uh. He claims that he's the volte dog
Speaker 8: of the law, meaning he's sort of blamed with everything
Speaker 8: that happened. And he said to have been involved in
Speaker 8: the furnitures for a burglary. He said to have been
Speaker 8: involved with one of the earliest assault in nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 8: a Jewish Russian immigry named Sophie Seideman, who was sort
Speaker 8: of a pillar of the community. He was beaten with
Speaker 8: a stick. She testified later on that he assaulted her.
Speaker 8: He's also convicted any two murders that nets the entire
Speaker 8: five game five members. So he's yeah, he's implicated and
Speaker 8: pretty much everything that this one gang is fit's linked to.
Speaker 4: You talk about the Romeo and Vigilante murders, but also
Speaker 4: the idea that prosecutors have to get around the idea
Speaker 4: that this drug that they administer these people might not
Speaker 4: have been well, it wasn't voluntary, So how do they
Speaker 4: get around admissibility and still use the evidence. How do
Speaker 4: they do that?
Speaker 8: The news reports of the court cases are not very detailed,
Speaker 8: and the actual court records that I was able to find,
Speaker 8: the few that I was able to find, were not
Speaker 8: very detailed. The prosecutors swore up and down that they
Speaker 8: just that it would not be an issue because they
Speaker 8: would use the information if they gained from the truths
Speaker 8: term to to convict these suspects. So, you know, they
Speaker 8: tried to get around it. It seemed to work. You know,
Speaker 8: they got convictions in all five of these suspects.
Speaker 4: So you have a very very interesting prosecution star witnessing
Speaker 4: the Peyton and Peyton Johnson first trial, and you talk
Speaker 4: about her name is Mary Sanders. Now this February twenty eighth,
Speaker 4: So tell us what Sanders says at trial about what
Speaker 4: she had heard.
Speaker 8: She says, They're all gathered at a house, a shack
Speaker 8: really a shanty in Birmingham one night. They're all playing cards. Uh,
Speaker 8: they're drinking a liquor that they referred to as skull
Speaker 8: and skulls and crossbones. Uh. When a group of people suggest, hey,
Speaker 8: let's go sculling now was slang for let's go rob
Speaker 8: someone today. It's hit a lick. It's one of the
Speaker 8: slaying terms in Birmingham today. But apparently it was well
Speaker 8: known that this woman, Lily Bell, she was a black woman.
Speaker 8: She had white people, white men at her house, I
Speaker 8: would assume for prostitution or liquor or drugs or all
Speaker 8: of it. And so they decided to go there. One
Speaker 8: of them grabs a gun, one grabs a rope. Uh,
Speaker 8: the one female, Pearl Jackson nineteen. She apparently dresses as
Speaker 8: a man, and so they go and apparently they come
Speaker 8: back later on talking about how well it went, and well,
Speaker 8: I know I killed the woman. I think I got
Speaker 8: the man. I saw his brains. This was easy. You know,
Speaker 8: we should try to do this again. Later on, she
Speaker 8: sees a bloody accent in the outhouse and they warn
Speaker 8: her that, you know, she doesn't keep her mouth shut,
Speaker 8: someone going to stamp her brains are out. Let's quote
Speaker 8: Stamford brains out. And she was later on in a
Speaker 8: jail camp. When they arrested you back in the day,
Speaker 8: they put you on a farm to work, you know.
Speaker 8: And so she was working with Pearl Jackson, and Pearl
Speaker 8: Jackson made her matches. You know, if you don't shut
Speaker 8: your mouth, I'm gonna tell what y'all did, get y'all
Speaker 8: sent away and decided to take him. Apparently heard that
Speaker 8: and that was one of the breaks in the case.
Speaker 8: But defense attorney said that she and a sister were
Speaker 8: in New Orleans during the time this happened. They couldn't
Speaker 8: have heard it. But the prosecutor said that would lie
Speaker 8: and actually charged them with perjury. I don't know the
Speaker 8: disposition of that.
Speaker 4: Now. The prosecution demanded the death penalty, and as a
Speaker 4: result of Mary Sanders' testimony, what was the result.
Speaker 8: It's concluded that Perl Jackson, who was nineteen, and her husband,
Speaker 8: Odella Jackson, they were sentenced to death. Others received varying
Speaker 8: the sentences from life to ten years. Interestingly enough, Alabama
Speaker 8: in the nineteen twenties, the death penalty was very controversy.
Speaker 8: That was really one of the biggest surprises for me personally.
Speaker 8: I'm an eighth generation Alabamian with here forty years my
Speaker 8: entire life, and even my most liberal friends are not
Speaker 8: all of that tied up in knots about the death vinity,
Speaker 8: but it was something Alabamians agonized over. We're very religious
Speaker 8: and the commandment says, now shan not killed. So the
Speaker 8: governor at the time, he's the son of a Methodist minister.
Speaker 8: He's allowed more than a dozen executions to proceed, but
Speaker 8: he he wrenches his hands over every one. Reportedly, and
Speaker 8: the sheriff of the time, who was a ku Kluck's
Speaker 8: Plan member, which is well known for, you know, hanging
Speaker 8: black men from trees, that to share. His job was
Speaker 8: to execute people. He had executed four black men and
Speaker 8: every one of them ate him up. He would very
Speaker 8: anti deathtility. He carried their pictures around with him. And
Speaker 8: so he was going to the governor and saying, hey,
Speaker 8: let's not do this, and he was really lobbying. And
Speaker 8: the governor comes to the conclusion that, you know, if
Speaker 8: we're not going to execute all five of them, how
Speaker 8: can we execute any of them. So there's some back
Speaker 8: and forth. You know, there was a medical issue with
Speaker 8: one of the suspects. There was a retrial, but ultimately,
Speaker 8: you know, Pearl and Odell, they're they're going to be
Speaker 8: executed in nineteen twenty five. She will be the first
Speaker 8: woman executed in Alabama since the Civil War. She will
Speaker 8: be the first woman executed in Birmingham. Ever, they will
Speaker 8: be the first married couple executed together. The prosecutors wanted
Speaker 8: all five of them hanged together, they would have that
Speaker 8: would have been historic in Alabama in the twentieth century.
Speaker 8: We'd tanged six people at one time in one day
Speaker 8: in the eighteen hundreds, but that related to wars with
Speaker 8: the Native Americans. That is a matter of law enforcement.
Speaker 8: We had never pained five people in one day in Alabama.
Speaker 8: But the others, the three others, they had lesser sentences,
Speaker 8: and the sheriff said, well, you remember, the governor said, well,
Speaker 8: I just can't see doing that. League commuted their their
Speaker 8: sentences the life, but they had very interi dates within
Speaker 8: like yeah, within two years, within months they had they
Speaker 8: had three execution date. They were like down to the
Speaker 8: wire and they just got pushed back and pushed back
Speaker 8: and pushed back.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: It's very interesting to talk about the Governor Brandon and
Speaker 4: these progressive thoughts, considering Sheriff Sureley a clan member and
Speaker 4: the Klan at that time, and given these kind of
Speaker 4: crimes too, where they said this Negro gang vigilante killing
Speaker 4: white men, black woman. You also talked about when you
Speaker 4: talk about this medical issue. On this second trial of
Speaker 4: one of these defendants, he had a stroke right on
Speaker 4: the stand and fell out of the fell out of
Speaker 4: the chair.
Speaker 8: So yeah, that's a.
Speaker 4: Medical issue for sure, certainly. And also that you say
Speaker 4: that they delayed the death sentence so that they could
Speaker 4: hang everyone. And in the end Brandon was progressive enough
Speaker 4: to say, Governor Brandon said, if they're not all going
Speaker 4: to get the same sentence, it's just unthinkable to execute
Speaker 4: one person and not execute the other. So they all
Speaker 4: had their life centsuss commuted or sentences commuted to life,
Speaker 4: didn't they That's great?
Speaker 8: But I think some of them serbliged sentences. Some I
Speaker 8: think one or two served like ten years in labor camps.
Speaker 8: And I actually heard from a it's a weird story,
Speaker 8: and I couldn't include it in the book because I
Speaker 8: just didn't have it nailed down. But I had turned
Speaker 8: into book and I was waiting to get the addis
Speaker 8: back and I get a call from an Alabama parole
Speaker 8: office and he says, Hey, I need to talk to
Speaker 8: you about a story you wrote in twenty thirteen. And
Speaker 8: I'm I'm a journalist to day to day you know,
Speaker 8: Birmingham news Dale, the time journalist. I'm thinking, oh, great,
Speaker 8: what can I tell them about some case from twenty thirteen.
Speaker 8: But that's when I had my original stories. You know,
Speaker 8: this wasn't a book form originally it was. It was
Speaker 8: three articles I wrote for al dot com in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 8: And so I called him. He said, yeah, I was.
Speaker 8: I work fugitive cases and I've been assigned to find
Speaker 8: ed Bullseye Jackson. Ed Bulldye Bullseye Jackson is one of
Speaker 8: the five suspects, one of the five people being convicted.
Speaker 8: And so you know Ed Bullseye Jackson would be like
Speaker 8: one hundred and ten years old. And so this officer
Speaker 8: is kind of laughing about it, like, you know, this
Speaker 8: is not this has been put on my dead do
Speaker 8: you know anything? And I'm like, no, of course not.
Speaker 8: And he said that what happened is this guy was
Speaker 8: paroled in the nineteen forties and disappeared. He skipped the roll.
Speaker 8: He was in his fifties at the time. He's born
Speaker 8: in the eighteen nineties, and so in the forties they
Speaker 8: led him out of prison, he skips his parole, and
Speaker 8: the state of Alabama today considers him the fugitive even
Speaker 8: though he's you know, like I said, probably going on
Speaker 8: one hundred and twenty. Yeah, so he just but it
Speaker 8: was just one of them in the night. He wouldn't
Speaker 8: the officer wouldn't go on the records. I just couldn't
Speaker 8: include all that. He's like, yeah, he's all these great
Speaker 8: records and stuff, blah blah blah, and then he just
Speaker 8: vanished on me. I was just dying. I was chomping
Speaker 8: in the bed to look at that file.
Speaker 4: We talked about Frank Owens and the copycat murders. Interesting
Speaker 4: how you talk about it's a copycat murder, and yet
Speaker 4: the people that committed the murders, apparently allegedly during this
Speaker 4: reign of terror on, none of them are going to
Speaker 4: receive death penalties, death sentences. And so now you have
Speaker 4: the Sheriff Shirley again, the known KKK lobbying Brandon to
Speaker 4: spare Owens from the death penalty. All right, tell us
Speaker 4: how that ends up.
Speaker 8: Well, Frank Owens he mentally ill. He assaults two white
Speaker 8: men right before the so called axe murderers are going
Speaker 8: to trial. They survive, he's arrested, he shot, he says
Speaker 8: he's eaten. So he's lingering in jail through the whole
Speaker 8: appeals process as the dramas in polding around Pearl and
Speaker 8: O'Dell Jackson. So after in nineteen twenty five, Pearl and
Speaker 8: Odell their sentences are commuted and eventually it comes down
Speaker 8: in nineteen September of nineteen twenty six, they decide to
Speaker 8: that the theory is that execute Frank Owen's. What's interesting
Speaker 8: about his case is that this is, in my estimation,
Speaker 8: according to everything to find, is the last legal hanging
Speaker 8: in Alabama. I'd say that because we've had lynchings, I
Speaker 8: personally covered murders where someone's hanging somebody, But this is
Speaker 8: the last execution I know of that was carried out
Speaker 8: by hanging in September twenty fourth, nineteen twenty six. After
Speaker 8: that we went to the electric chair. And it's also
Speaker 8: one of the very few cases where it's not a murder.
Speaker 8: Most of the people we've executed are murderers. I found
Speaker 8: a couple of rape cases, one early eighteen hundred, counter
Speaker 8: fenty cases, but yeah, this is probably one of the
Speaker 8: last rock Police we executed somebody for a robbery, assault
Speaker 8: or attempted murder, and so it's yeah, It was a
Speaker 8: it was a cut wrenching experience. The guards had known
Speaker 8: him for more than a year, and so they're crying.
Speaker 8: The inmates who were you know, they were crying. The
Speaker 8: sheriff was, you know, very upset. But the governor, Governor Brandon,
Speaker 8: who opposed that death nity, just felt that that was
Speaker 8: justice in this case, and he allowed to proceed. It
Speaker 8: was the last execution for Brandon. It was the last
Speaker 8: execution for sheriffs. Surely after that, the sheriff still longer
Speaker 8: carried out executions. It was done at the state level.
Speaker 8: It was just a very dramatic scene and in so
Speaker 8: much historic.
Speaker 4: You talk in the book about it was interesting and
Speaker 4: very again, very cinematic scene where Odell and Pearl Jackson,
Speaker 4: the couple that are accused of murder, that deny any
Speaker 4: killing anyone, are given their last meal. Just tell us
Speaker 4: about that scene, because I thought that was very interesting.
Speaker 4: That's how close. So tell us about their last meal
Speaker 4: and what was they were told during that last meal?
Speaker 8: Sure, you know, ready to go out. So Pearl Jackson
Speaker 8: wants to go out with a full stomach, and so
Speaker 8: she had a full fried chicken, She had a whole watermelon,
Speaker 8: she had a whole bunch of ice creams. She had.
Speaker 8: Let me see what I'll have come to look out
Speaker 8: the whole list of it. A water bo a quarter
Speaker 8: by a screen tomatoes. She was ready to die as
Speaker 8: soon as she gets plenty to eat. And so she's
Speaker 8: halfway through eating this meal and they're like, hey, no,
Speaker 8: you've given a reprieve. We're going to see about this
Speaker 8: new trial, and so she says, and then she then
Speaker 8: the sheriff makes a joke that he's going to take
Speaker 8: the watermelon away from her, and she gets upset and no, no,
Speaker 8: I'm not going to.
Speaker 4: But yeah, yeah, very very interesting the last meal and
Speaker 4: then they get to reprieve. You talk about that everybody wanted,
Speaker 4: the entire city of Birmingham, the governor, the sheriff, police force,
Speaker 4: the people, shopkeepers, Italian immigrants, non Italian shopkeeper immigrants that
Speaker 4: were attacked as well. But you say that there you
Speaker 4: do chronicle other crimes that have the same moo or
Speaker 4: similar So tell us what you found.
Speaker 8: I think that what happened is to the end of it,
Speaker 8: when they're ready to like close in on these suspects
Speaker 8: and it's one these two murders, the Turner bail murders.
Speaker 8: I think they start going through and just looking at
Speaker 8: what they have over and I think the very first murder,
Speaker 8: John Delizer, I mean there's more than a year long
Speaker 8: gap between that and the next murder. So I think
Speaker 8: they just look for any blunt force trauma homicide robberies
Speaker 8: and they start lumping it in and the press is
Speaker 8: eager to go along to that ride, so they just
Speaker 8: sort of sore they wrap it all up. And this
Speaker 8: one thing, interestingly enough, but the days of right before
Speaker 8: the days before Frank Allen is executed, and a man
Speaker 8: named Benjamin Benjamin Alper, he's a Russian immigry hei there
Speaker 8: in his sixties or his seventies. He runs a hat
Speaker 8: shop in Birmingham. He goes to work, someone hits him
Speaker 8: from behind, kills them, robs and it's exact same m
Speaker 8: And this is more than a year after Pearl and
Speaker 8: Odell were almost executed. This is days before Frank Owens
Speaker 8: is about to be executed. One news article says that
Speaker 8: Frian was as gruesome as to what Frank Owens did,
Speaker 8: but there's no other mention in any of these news
Speaker 8: reports about Ale. It's linked.
Speaker 4: So yeah, and so attribute some of the murders to
Speaker 4: and other murders to. What's your take on all of this.
Speaker 4: You really don't make any conclusions in this. You don't
Speaker 4: say this happens, that happened. But I'm curious to what
Speaker 4: you think this all could be attributed to.
Speaker 8: I don't make those pollutions because I just don't feel
Speaker 8: like I have the information available to do that. I just, yeah,
Speaker 8: I'm relying on h questionable news reports and the shady
Speaker 8: recollections of the grandchildren of people who were associated with it,
Speaker 8: and US can't number of court records. That's basically all
Speaker 8: I had to go on. I think there were some
Speaker 8: clusters of these cases. They were probably related. Probably some
Speaker 8: other clusters are related. Probably some that are just completely
Speaker 8: un just one off, you know, cases that had nothing
Speaker 8: to do with anything I do suspect, and I would
Speaker 8: love to know it, and I don't drive me crazy
Speaker 8: because I never I will never know it. But there
Speaker 8: was some sort of organized gang. There was some badass
Speaker 8: acts building gang enforceder in Birmingham who committed probably two
Speaker 8: or three of these murders, at least maybe five. Some
Speaker 8: You think of Luca Brozie from the Godfather, I think
Speaker 8: there was some Southern Fried Luca Brozi and I'll never
Speaker 8: know who that is that I think he's out there
Speaker 8: or he was.
Speaker 4: Do you think that you could conclude that there was
Speaker 4: two sets of motivations. One was to rob shopkeepers either
Speaker 4: through that they had not relent or were relenting to extortion.
Speaker 4: So it was robbery and intimidation and the axes and
Speaker 4: like again, very much like the Black hen And then also,
Speaker 4: is there any credibility, like you say these people were convicted,
Speaker 4: is there any credibility this black gang assembled to not
Speaker 4: have white men and black women together.
Speaker 8: I think there's probably more than there's probably more than
Speaker 8: two motives. I think some were robberies. I think some
Speaker 8: were extortions. I think some were probably you know, disputes
Speaker 8: between people.
Speaker 6: Uh.
Speaker 8: I think it's kind of I don't know if probably
Speaker 8: some of them were drug related. As far as the
Speaker 8: to go into it, I don't think we've really got
Speaker 8: into it. But there were letters to the police and
Speaker 8: one of the newspapers from a group that said there
Speaker 8: were color KKK. The color KKK was going to try
Speaker 8: to keep white men away from black women. And I've
Speaker 8: first heard of that when I saw like news clippings
Speaker 8: of from the sheriffs and the police, and I thought, Okay,
Speaker 8: whatever white police white share, if they're just trying to
Speaker 8: find some way to blame them some black folks. But
Speaker 8: then the editor of this Southern the the black newspaper
Speaker 8: here in Birmingham, a very well respected man, he shared
Speaker 8: the same theory. It just it seems so outlandish. They're
Speaker 8: just just so hard to believe that there's some colored
Speaker 8: KKK that is mobilizing against interracial couples. But it will
Speaker 8: go widely accepted theory. I don't know. I tend to
Speaker 8: believe that if prostitution is the oldest profession, then robbing
Speaker 8: people engaged in prostitution is probably the second oldest. You
Speaker 8: know though, that seems more logical to me than just
Speaker 8: being a social statement. But I've heard of crazier things happening.
Speaker 4: Do you think there's a relevance, especially given the time,
Speaker 4: in terms of the weapon used, the acts, and its
Speaker 4: relation to all of the.
Speaker 8: Christ pretty much every building, pretty much every building anywhere,
Speaker 8: a house, a school, a business, a church. They had
Speaker 8: wood burn burning stoves. If you cooked your food, you
Speaker 8: probably used would if you heated your house and used
Speaker 8: wood used coal to but wood burning stoves were just
Speaker 8: a staple of life, and so to have that you
Speaker 8: had short handled axes that you would chop up the
Speaker 8: wood with. As I researched these cases, I came across
Speaker 8: other axe murders that were just completely unrelated. An escaped
Speaker 8: inmate in North Alabama would find an axe and a
Speaker 8: wood pile and attack of family or to guys. We'd
Speaker 8: get into a fight behind the house and one of
Speaker 8: them would pick up an axe. And not everybody could
Speaker 8: afford a gun back then, but access were just around. Also,
Speaker 8: there's the reports of the climbs or very details as
Speaker 8: far as they came in. They asked for this, they
Speaker 8: asked for that, and when the person turned, they hit him.
Speaker 8: When they hit him, then they turn around and they
Speaker 8: cut their throat. So it gave sort of a blueprint.
Speaker 8: He read that first report of that first murder, you
Speaker 8: had an idea of how to commit it, though I
Speaker 8: think there were probably a lot of copycats in the
Speaker 8: mix there.
Speaker 4: Do you have one tale that you talk about that
Speaker 4: five months after a relative, a son of one of
Speaker 4: the murdered shopkeepers, tell us about this interesting response to
Speaker 4: whether it happened five months before to his relatives.
Speaker 8: Is this the Romeo digil Anti case you're talking about?
Speaker 4: I believe so, yes, Okay.
Speaker 8: His sister was in her twenties and her mother was
Speaker 8: this mantriarch. She's described as a pioneer of Birmingham. Her
Speaker 8: husband worked on the railroads or Italian immigrants. Her husband
Speaker 8: had died. She had a large family, Uh, Elizabeth Romeo
Speaker 8: and Juliet Digilante. I also, I can't help up be
Speaker 8: a these by the fact that this murdered young woman's
Speaker 8: maiden name was Juliet Romeo. But it was I guess,
Speaker 8: Juliet Romeo, I guess. But Juliette Digilante, her husband Bernard
Speaker 8: is out as a play. A guy comes in, he
Speaker 8: brutally kills her, kills her mother, Elizabeth Romeo, and the bed.
Speaker 8: Juliet's daughter, Caroline, who's three, survived. She's not assaulted, but
Speaker 8: she she lives the whole ordeal. So months later, Juliette's brother, Ernest,
Speaker 8: he's working and an African American man who, according him
Speaker 8: one news report, had been giving him trouble quote unquote,
Speaker 8: just aroused his suspicion and he took out a gun
Speaker 8: and shot him. To my knowledge, he survived. I couldn't
Speaker 8: find any subset reports to counter that, but it's just
Speaker 8: sort of indicative. So, I mean, people were store owners
Speaker 8: were carrying guns. There were news reports that store owners
Speaker 8: were buying World War One helmets to protect their heads.
Speaker 8: I mean, it's there was a lot of panic, and
Speaker 8: so if your sister and your mother were murdered, dance
Speaker 8: reason might act unreasonably and if you have a gun nearby,
Speaker 8: then there you go.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's fascinating the response based on the media and
Speaker 4: just the fear of the people. In this four year period,
Speaker 4: as you say, twenty murders and twenty one people injured,
Speaker 4: panic sees the entire city of Birmingham, and the media
Speaker 4: reported on what was going on Birmingham throughout across the country.
Speaker 4: Like you had mentioned, I want to thank you very
Speaker 4: much for coming on and talking about the infamous Birmingham
Speaker 4: AX murders. For those that might want to contact you
Speaker 4: possibly or see your work, do you have a Facebook
Speaker 4: page or a website that they might see and look at.
Speaker 8: Yeah, if you go to Facebook, the infamous Birmingham AX
Speaker 8: murders starts that on Facebook, you should be able to
Speaker 8: find me. The books available born to notable Amazon target, Walmart.
Speaker 4: Virtually everywhere. I want to thank you very much, Jeremy W.
Speaker 4: Gray for coming on and talking about the infamous Birmingham
Speaker 4: axe murders, prohibition gangsters, and vigilante justice. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much. Hope to speak to you again.
Speaker 8: I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Thank you,
Speaker 8: good night.