Violation: Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South. David Rose
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latest developments in identification techniques, and ensured that the city had the most modern technology. Yet he wasn’t called to any of the strangling crime scenes. He had left the police in 1984, but his bitterness was still near the surface.
‘You had to be part of that madness to know what it was really like. The pressure, not just in the Police Department, but across the whole city was incredible, and it was being applied right in the middle of the racial divide. But the shit they put on me: not trusting me to take part in the investigation because they thought the killer was black!’ He shook his head. ‘I suppose they thought I’d try to fudge the evidence.’
After the second strangling, the murder of Miss Dimenstein, Chief McClung announced that all police leave was cancelled indefinitely. Staff who normally worked on administrative duties were moved to the streets to join new, intensive patrols, especially in Wynnton. Both the city and the state pledged money for a reward fund. Within a week it stood at $11,000, a substantial sum in 1977. And then, nine days after Dimenstein’s death, came the break Columbus had been praying for.
Jerome Livas, an African-American odd-job man aged twenty-eight, lived in south Columbus with a much older woman – Beatrice Brier, who was fifty-five. Early on Sunday, 2 October, she was found by the porch of her home, beaten and unconscious. As her partner, Livas immediately became a prime suspect. He was arrested and questioned by two detectives, Gene Hillhouse and Warren Myles. Livas, a short, muscular man who looked older than his years, was illiterate and easily confused. The detectives, he said years later, told him that if he confessed to beating Beatrice Brier, he could go home. He quickly fell for this transparent ploy, and told them that he had. Six days later she died from her injuries, and although he retracted it, his confession was enough to secure him a life sentence for murder.
Hillhouse and Myles were intrigued by the wide age gap between Livas and Brier, and wondered whether his interest in older women might mean he had strangled Ferne Jackson and Jean Dimenstein. They began to question him about their murders, and as they talked, they made notes of everything they told Livas about what had happened. They were well aware of the danger of generating a completely bogus ‘confession’ to the crimes, containing nothing but recycled information their suspect had learned from them. Unbeknown to Myles and Hillhouse, after they went home at the end of the day, three more detectives – Ronald Lynn, Robert Matthews and Robert Coddington – continued the interrogation. They were much less careful, and made no note of their questions. Their interrogation lasted for much of the night.
Around midnight, the cops bundled Livas into a police car and drove him to the scenes of the murders. Along the way, they also drove by the Wynnton home of another possible victim of the strangler, Gertrude Miller, aged sixty-four, who had been beaten and raped, but not murdered, five days before Mrs Jackson was attacked. At each house, the detectives made Livas get out, lighting the shadows with powerful torches in the hope that this would enhance his recollections, and make them more vivid.
By 2.45 a.m. on 3 October, they had a full, typed confession. In the bare police interrogation room they read it back to Livas, and he marked it with the one thing he knew how to write, his name. It was an impressive document, filled with details about the murders which had not been made public, and which, journalists were later told, ‘only the killer could have known’.
Livas’s statement began with an account of the rape of Gertrude Miller – a crime that had been given no publicity. He said he managed to enter her home by pulling the screen off her back-room window, hit her on the side of the head with a mop handle, and tied her hands and feet with stockings. Then, Livas supposedly said, ‘I took her clothes off. I fucked her for a little while and pulled my dick out and ate her pussy a little bit and then fucked her some more. When I got through fucking her, I hit her some more with the stick.’
According to Livas’s confession, he decided to attack Ferne Jackson after seeing her get out of a car being driven by someone else and go inside her house. The police, of course, knew she had been dropped at her home by her friend Lucy Mangham. The rest of Livas’s account was a close match with other known facts:
I waited down the street on the corner until I didn’t see no lights on at the house. I went to the house and went up on the porch where some glass doors were. I had a screwdriver with me. I stuck the screwdriver in the right side of the door and forced the lock. I went in the door and looked around the house and found an old woman asleep in the bed in the bedroom. She had on some type of gown. I put my hand over her mouth and she tried to move. I hit her pretty hard in the eye with my fist. I raised her gown up. I started fucking her in the pussy and then I ate her pussy. She was crying while I was fucking her. I was buck fucking her with her legs pulled up toward her head. I looked around in some drawers and found a stocking. I wrapped the stocking around her neck and pulled it tight and tied it in a knot.
Livas said he stole his victim’s car and left it on a dirt road off Lawyers Lane in south Columbus, exactly where Mrs Jackson’s vehicle had been found. His confession to murdering and raping Jean Dimenstein was equally vivid and, seemingly, accurate. Having tried to open a window, he said, he went round to the port where her car, a blue Chevrolet, was parked:
I took the hinges off the door. I threw them out in the backyard. I took the door off and set it to the side … I found an old woman in the bedroom asleep. I put my hand over her mouth and she was trying to wake up. I hit her with my fist. I don’t remember where I hit her. She had on some kind of housecoat. She had on a pair of panties. I took her panties off and threw them down. Then I pushed her legs back and buck fucked her. Then I ate her pussy a little bit. I got a stocking from a chair and wrapped it round her neck and choked her … I went out the same door I came in and got in [her] car and left. I put the radio station on WOKS because I always listen to it. I took the car pretty close to where I left the last car but left it on a paved street this time.
Dimenstein’s car radio – as the police, but not the press, knew – had indeed been tuned to WOKS when it was found on a paved road in Carver Heights.
Three days later, on 6 October, the police showed Gertrude Miller, the woman who had apparently survived the strangler’s attack, an array of photographs. She picked out Livas. His picture, she said, was the one that looked most like the man who raped her, and had ‘all the right features’. It looked as if the case was nailed. On 14 October, the Deputy Police Chief C.B. Falson, the robbery-homicide squad director Ronnie Jones, and his deputy, Herman Boone, called a press conference. Jerome Livas, they announced, was officially a suspect for the stranglings. If convicted, he could expect to be sentenced to death.
Even then, there were some members of the CPD who had their doubts. Carl Cannon, a young reporter with the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, spoke to an anonymous police source who told him Livas was a ‘twenty-four-carat idiot with the intelligence level of a five-year-old’. Another said Livas had not understood the contents of his own confession, let alone the implications of signing it without having seen a lawyer: ‘Explaining that to him is like explaining Einstein’s quantum theory of physics [sic] to a three-year-old.’ Livas’s employer, William Renfro, told Cannon he was ‘slow, illiterate and stupid’, and would ‘say anything’. But Chief McClung was confident the police had got their man. The special patrols in Wynnton were stood down.
Florence Scheible was a widow of eighty-nine, almost blind, and walked only with the aid of a Zimmer frame. Originally from Iowa, she moved to Columbus because she liked its warm weather. On the morning of 21 October, while Livas remained in custody, her neighbours saw her outside at about 11 a.m., shuffling in the garden in front of her two-storey house on Dimon Street, a few blocks from the murders. Three-and-a-half hours later, her son Paul, a colonel in the military, called the police, saying he had come to visit and found her dead.
Ed Gibson, a CPD patrolman, went inside, into the tidy living room. Antique furniture and a rug stood on a polished hardwood floor; there was a television in the corner. Mrs Scheible was lying on her bed in the bedroom next door, next to her walker. Her dress had been pulled above her waist, exposing her pubic area, which was covered in blood. She was wearing one nylon stocking. The other had been wrapped around her neck.
In the wake of Florence Scheible’s murder, Columbus was seized by dread. The special patrols reappeared,