Blood Done Sign My Name Page 27
Lawyers for both sides questioned seventy prospective jurors from Wake County and thirty from Warren County. Frank Banzet, playing exactly the role for which Watkins had hired him, quickly moved to have all the jurors from Wake County rejected on the grounds that the juror selection cards had been stored in the basement of a hospital. They should have been kept in the office of the register of deeds, he argued. Only nine of the one hundred jurors chosen for examination were African Americans, despite the fact that Warren County was over two-thirds black and Wake County was more than one-third black. When James Ferguson of the prosecution complained that blacks had been systematically excluded from the pool of jurors, Banzet ridiculed the black attorney. Yes, there had indeed been discrimination, Banzet chuckled. The names listed all began with letters from L through W, he charged satirically, “thus obviously ‘systematically excluding’ persons whose names begin with the letters A through K.” Moreover, all jurors from Wake County should be excluded, he persisted, because Wake’s juror selection cards “are punched with numerous holes which are incomprehensible to a person of ordinary learning and understanding.” Wake County used then-novel and now-obsolete computer punch cards for its jury lists. These computing machines had made “more than 27 mistakes in the past three weeks,” he claimed, coming up with a remarkable statistic on the spot.
What truly bothered Banzet about Wake County was that it was home to several universities and the state capitol in Raleigh and therefore relatively liberal compared to Granville. Warren County, on the other hand, had always been tobacco country, much like Granville, with a black majority dominated by an agricultural and political elite descended from slaveholding planters. Even though the county was mostly black, the courthouse crowd in Warrenton had a long history of making sure that jury lists would be mostly white. Frank Banzet knew how things worked up there. The attorneys for Robert and Larry Teel wanted an all-white jury, and preferably an all-white jury drawn from a conservative, rural county.
The questions the Teel defense team posed to the prospective jurors clearly revealed their legal strategy. “Do you believe that a citizen has the right to self-defense?” they asked over and over again. “Do you believe that a man has the right to take the life of another man to protect himself or members of his family from harm?” The defense struck all nine of the black jurors and got their all-white jury, seven men and five women, half of them from Warren County. Every member of the jury had conceded that he or she did, in fact, support the right of citizens to defend themselves and their families by force. The prosecution was crestfallen, and the black people attending the trial were incensed, if not surprised. At the end of the day, Judge Martin ordered the jurors sequestered at a local motel for the duration of the trial.
The confusion among the police and the prosecutors—and the Oxford Police Department’s failure to arrest Roger—became Billy Watkins’s secret weapon. At the outset of the trial, Watkins made a successful motion to Judge Martin that all of the state’s witnesses be sequestered. Therefore, the witnesses would be unable to hear one another’s testimony or the testimony of the defense witnesses. This approach took maximum advantage of the confusion created because the prosecution had failed to indict everyone who had participated in the murder, which Watkins knew. Prosecutor Burgwyn countered by asking the judge to sequester all of the defense witnesses as well. “When we went to court,” Boo Chavis recounted, “they put us in different rooms.”
It is not clear how the defense attorneys managed to have most of their witnesses elude the judge’s sequestration order. Roger Oakley was not listed as a witness and did not even come to the trial until the last day. In the end, Colleen Teel did not testify, and the court managed to compel only one of the five eventual witnesses for the defense to obey the sequestration order. This was true despite the fact that the defense team knew they would be calling those witnesses. Watkins even knew he would be calling Roger Oakley to the stand, but he kept silent. “We knew right after the arrest what had happened,” defense attorney Edmundson recalled. “[Roger Oakley] came in and we talked with him, took tapes, and put them in the safe, and no one else knew.”
At about three in the afternoon on Wednesday, July 29, the bailiff picked up the big courtroom Bible and Willie T. Harris, the seventeen-year-old African American who had driven the dying Henry Marrow to the hospital, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Harris, the first witness to take the stand, told the court that he had been sitting in his automobile under the shed at the Tidewater Seafood Market with three other young men on the evening of the murder. He heard Marrow and someone else—a white man, he thought—arguing loudly. Harris got out of his car to see what was going on and observed Larry Teel standing in front of the motorcycle shop with a big stick, swinging it at Henry Marrow. Almost immediately, Robert Teel dashed out of the barbershop with a shotgun, Harris said, “and I ran.” As his feet carried him down Highway 158 and up into Grab-all, he had heard two or three shots. Returning a few minutes later, Harris told the court, he saw Marrow lying on his back behind the Tidewater Seafood Market with Larry Teel standing over him.
The second witness for the prosecution was Boo Chavis. After all the violence in Oxford in May and June, the Chavis family had sent Boo to New Jersey to keep him safe and out of trouble, although the authorities had already apprehended him in several cases involving theft. Just as he got off a bus in Newark, sheriff’s deputies handed the young man a subpoena and told him he had to testify at a trial in North Carolina. The diminutive young Chavis, who wore small spectacles, opened his testimony by recounting how he had been walking to the store after a game of bid whist at a friend’s house down the street. His testimony was familiar to both sides because of the earlier hearings and the newspaper coverage. Chavis was probably the most damning witness for the prosecution, and the defense attorneys were determined to rattle him.
Chavis continued to testify that he had been on his way to the drink machine when four boys flew by him, running as fast as they could. The last one yelled, “Come on, Dickie,” recounted Chavis. He heard a shotgun blast and saw Dickie Marrow skidding onto his face in the gravel behind the Tidewater. Moments later, shotgun pellets burned his face, arms, neck, and hands, and the pain and blood blinded him for a second. Robert Teel accosted him in the doorway of the Tidewater Seafood Market and “put a shotgun barrel in my face and pulled the trigger,” Chavis said that he testified. When the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber, Teel and his sons ran over to the fallen Marrow and began kicking and beating him. “Okay, you got me,” Chavis reported that Marrow begged his attackers. “Let’s forget it.” According to Chavis, Robert Teel then barked at his son, “Shoot the son of a bitch!” Another shot rang out “that sounded about like a cap pistol,” said Chavis—the .22-caliber rifle shot that ended Henry Marrow’s life.
In a move that must have been calculated to inflame the racial feelings of the all-white jury, Banzet “asked me did I seen the man [who had fired the shot that killed Henry Marrow] in here, and I told him yes.” Recalling the scene years later, Chavis said, “He said, ‘Will you get up and go touch him.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ” Chavis walked across the courtroom and stepped up to Larry Teel. “I went over there and touched him, like that,” Chavis recounted, extending his index finger. For a defiant young black man to put his hands on a white man in court could not help but make white jurors uneasy, but the judge did not intervene.
Billy Watkins, who sat impassively chewing Life Savers during the entire weeklong trial, calmly cross-examined Chavis in an effort to discredit his powerful testimony. “Watkins, when I was on the stand, he asked me had I ever been in any trouble.” Trouble was one big reason why the Chavis family had sent Boo to New Jersey, and his local police record indicated that he had had plenty of clashes with the law. “I told him, yeah, but I ain’t on trial.” Watkins forced Chavis to recount more or less his entire rap sheet in front of the jury. “What was I on probation for, what had I be
en in, all that,” Chavis said, “and I told him aiding and abetting, receiving stolen goods, breaking and entering, but I said I still wasn’t on trial and I didn’t kill nobody, either.” Watkins had made his point.
“This other lady that saw it, Mrs. Downey,” Chavis explained to me, “she was standing behind a bush, but she didn’t want to cooperate.” In fact, the next witness, a fearful black woman named Evelyn Downey, had kept silent until she was subpoenaed and had refused to admit except under oath that she had seen any of the events behind the Teel place on the night of the murder. It was rumored that the Ku Klux Klan had threatened to burn her family’s house and store if she testified. “Mrs. Downey testified she had not disclosed her knowledge of the shooting until last week when an agent of the State Bureau of Investigation, Ray Freeman, told her she would be subpoenaed as a witness,” the News and Observer reported. “Mrs. Downey said she had kept silent because she feared for her elderly in-laws who own and operate Downey’s Grocery, located near the scene of the shooting.” The tiny store, only a few yards from the Teel place, was really little more than a shack that sold snacks and soft drinks. Mrs. Downey told the court that she had been inside at about eight forty-five on the night of the murder when she heard shouting and the sound of several people running past the store. She stepped outside under a tree and looked over toward the Tidewater Seafood Market and Teel’s place.
“There were three white men standing over a boy, kicking him back and forth on the ground,” Downey testified in a quavering voice. “And I yelled, ‘You better stop before you kill him.’ ” Robert Teel replied, “You better get back into the store,” according to Downey. She did not really recognize the other two men, she said, nor did she go back inside. “They kept kicking him back and forth and hitting him with the guns,” Mrs. Downey testified, “and then Mr. Teel said ‘Shoot the son of a bitch.’ Then he said it again, ‘Shoot the son of a bitch nigger.’ And I heard the shot and ran back into the store.” It was Larry Teel, she indicated, who’d held the rifle. Mrs. Downey collapsed in tears after testifying, and the bailiff helped her out of the courtroom. At that, the state rested its case against the Teels.
Judy Teel, Larry’s eighteen-year-old wife, was the first witness for the defense the next day. She had seen a bunch of “them,” she said, referring to the young black men, coming over from the fish market before the trouble started. She testified that Henry Marrow, whom she said she had never seen before, had called out to her, “Hey, white girl. Hey, white girl.” Larry had stepped out of the shop and told the black man not to speak to her like that, in her account, and Marrow had advanced on her husband with a knife and used foul language, she told the court. Larry did not kick Henry Marrow, like some people said, she asserted, but when Marrow attacked him she ran to the front of the barbershop to get Teel and Roger to “help Larry. I just yelled for them to help Larry.” She knew that there were guns in the barbershop, she admitted, but she never saw anyone with a gun at any time. In a massive irregularity that I cannot explain, Judy was the only witness for the defense who followed Judge Martin’s sequestration order and thus did not hear the testimony of the other witnesses.
Neither Larry Teel nor his father had been expected to testify at the trial. But Billy Watkins called him to the stand. “In a surprise move here Thursday,” the News and Observer reported, “Larry Teel, 18-year-old son of a local barber, Robert Teel, took the witness stand in Granville County Superior Court and denied that he shot and killed a local Negro man.” According to Larry, whom one seasoned courtroom observer described as “obviously terrified,” he and his wife had been rolling motorcycles into the shop when Marrow walked toward them. “Hey, white girl. Hey, you son of a bitch,” Larry quoted the young black man as having said. When Larry objected to Marrow’s talking to his wife disrespectfully, he told the court, the black man replied, “Come on, I am a soul brother,” and brandished a knife at him. When Marrow rushed at him, “I kicked him in the chest,” Larry Teel said, contradicting his wife’s testimony. “He staggered back and grabbed a handful of gravel and threw it at me. About that time I heard a shotgun.”
When he found the young black man on the ground, Larry claimed, he straddled Marrow, hit him several times with his fists, took the knife away from him, and jumped to his feet. As he stood over Marrow, the younger Teel claimed, he saw a gun pointed at the fallen man’s head. “I was looking down at a rifle barrel,” said Teel, “and it jerked and went off.” His father and another man were standing with him at the time, Larry swore, but he didn’t see who the other man was. He had not fired a gun, nor even held a gun at any point that night, Larry maintained. Though he admitted to having had one foot on either side of Marrow’s body when he heard the gunshot, he did not know who was holding the weapon. He said he had absolutely no clue who might have fired the gun that killed Henry Marrow, though he admitted that his father was present. Larry recognized his father’s voice, he conceded, “when he told me ‘I’m going to go call an ambulance and the police.’ ”
As hard as it must have been for anyone in the room to believe Larry Teel’s shaky and sullen account of the killing, what happened the next day was even more far-fetched. In fact, the last day of testimony fully justified prosecutor Burgwyn’s comparison to the Perry Mason show, which my father and I often watched together. In those days, Perry Mason was television’s most popular detective, a dark, brooding defense attorney who unraveled mysterious murders in an hour, not counting commercials. By the third or fourth commercial break, the handsome Tv lawyer knew who the killer was—but he wasn’t telling. In the climactic courtroom scene of each episode—the accused was always innocent—the real murderer would stand up and blurt out a startling confession and the blameless person before the bar of justice would go free. The plots on Perry Mason were predictable even to an eleven-year-old, but no one except Billy Watkins seemed to anticipate what was about to happen in the Granville County courthouse on August 31, 1970.
That morning, Watkins called Roger Oakley to the stand. Roger had not been named as either a witness or a suspect; the prosecution witnesses had all identified his brother Larry as the one who had fired the lethal bullet. Roger had not even attended the trial, despite the fact that his brother and his father sat charged with first-degree murder. “The trial of an Oxford man and his son on charges of murdering a 23-year-old black man took a startling turn on Friday,” a reporter for the News and Observer wrote, “when another member of the defendants’ family testified in Granville County Superior Court that he was holding the gun that fired the fatal shot.” He was working on the boat parked in front of the barbershop with his father, Roger Oakley testified, when he heard his brother’s wife “holler for me to help Larry.”
He ran around the corner of the motorcycle shop and saw a black man coming at his younger brother with a knife, he told the court. When he saw his father run out of the barbershop with a shotgun, he went inside and got the combined .410 shotgun and .22 rifle over-and-under and ran after his father, who fired the 12-gauge shotgun at a man who was running. Oakley testified that when he got to the other side of the seafood market, he saw his father and Larry standing above the fallen Henry Marrow, and he joined them, aiming the gun down at Marrow’s head. At no time, he said, did Larry have a gun in his hand that night. “Someone bumped my shoulder and the gun went off,” Roger said quietly, tears streaming down his face. “I didn’t mean to kill nobody.”
Prosecutor Burgwyn, red-faced and nearly sputtering, roared into his cross-examination. “Why haven’t you told the truth before?” he demanded. “If this was an accident, why did you let your father and brother stand trial for first-degree murder?”
“Because my lawyer told me not to,” Roger Oakley whispered. “My lawyer told me not to say nothing.”
“Do you mean to tell this jury that you let your father and your brother stay in jail without privilege of bond since May 12, and didn’t tell anybody you shot the man, and that the shooting was an accident?” Burgwyn aske
d. Roger replied that he had only decided to testify the week before. “Your father and your brother were on trial for their lives in this courthouse,” the gray-haired prosecutor said softly to the young man. “On trial for their lives,” he repeated, “charged with capital murder. And you have not set foot in this courtroom. Why haven’t you come here before?”
Roger Oakley stared at the floor. “My attorney told me not to come,” he whispered.
“So your brother Larry never touched that gun? Did I hear you correctly on that point?” the prosecutor asked.
“Yes, sir,” Oakley replied. “I never saw him touch a gun the whole time.”
“Both barrels of that gun had been fired,” Burgwyn said. “The rifle barrel that killed Henry Marrow, and the .410-shotgun underneath had been fired, too. Did you fire the shotgun and the rifle?”
“I refuse to answer on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” Roger chanted quietly, as if he were talking to himself.
“The boy who lay on the ground, begging for his life, helpless, Roger—did you kick him?”
“I was kicking him,” Oakley replied quietly. “We was all kicking him.”