The Kidnap Years: by David Stout (popular books of all time TXT) 📗

By this time, the press had reported that the confessions of Thurmond and Holmes did not jibe in every respect. Could the discrepancies help one or both of the killers avoid conviction and a trip to the gallows? There was also uncertainty as to who had jurisdiction. Was it Santa Clara County, since the victim had been kidnapped in San Jose? Or was it San Mateo County, since the victim had apparently been thrown off the bridge on the San Mateo side? But since the body was found near the bay shore of Alameda County, maybe Alameda should take charge.

When viewed without emotion (which was impossible for the people to do), these were not difficult questions. The issue of which county should have jurisdiction could have been resolved with friendly discussions among prosecutors.

But that would have taken time. The savagery of the killers, the nonchalant way they recounted their crime, had enraged the people of San Jose. They wanted quick justice. Talk of a lynching was in the air days before Brooke Hart’s body was found. And Governor James Rolph said he had no intention of calling in the National Guard to protect a couple of lowlifes.

On the night of November 26, a crowd began to gather outside the San Jose jail. The crowd grew, morphing into a full-throated mob and lusting for blood.

Several times that night, jail officers hurled tear gas grenades to drive back the people. Then some men ripped two sections of heavy pipe, each some thirty feet long, from the construction site of a new post office next to the jail. Using the pipes as battering rams, the vigilantes surged into the jail, beating the sheriff and a deputy. The invaders seized the jailhouse keys and opened the cells that held Thurmond and Holmes.

The terrified prisoners were dragged to a park in front of the Santa Clara County courthouse, facing the jail. They saw ropes being hurled over tree limbs, to the accompaniment of whoops and cheers. Knowing the fate that awaited them, did Thurmond and Holmes, who had been unmoved by the terror and suffering of their victim, finally feel empathy for Brooke Hart?

Thurmond was first. Almost in a faint, he did not resist. Thousands cheered as his body was hoisted. But Holmes was powerful, over six feet tall and weighing more than two hundred pounds. He fought fiercely as the noose was tightened around his neck. Finally, he, too, was pulled up, writhing in the beams of flashlights as the mob howled.

The next day, Governor Rolph expressed his delight at the pioneer justice, calling the lynchings “a fine lesson to the whole nation.”115

“With all the sorrows we have had, why should we add the sorrows of kidnapping?” he said. “It is about time the people should have comfort in their homes. This kidnapping business has become so bad that mothers and fathers are afraid to let their children out of their homes.

“Look at the Lindbergh case. Kidnappers have taken little children, killed them, and then jockeyed for huge sums of money. Now they have taken to kidnapping men and women for the purpose of extracting money from their distracted relatives.”

Making clear that he had given considerable thought to his statement and that he meant exactly what he said, Rolph said he had checked to see how many California prison inmates were behind bars for kidnapping. He suggested that kidnappers be turned over to “those fine, patriotic San Jose citizens.”

Rolph declared that no kidnapper would be released from prison while he was governor—and that he would pardon anyone arrested for lynching a kidnapper.

No doubt, many people felt as the governor did. Some said so publicly. “Congratulations on your attitude toward the Hart case,” a minister from Redlands, California, wired Rolph. A former judge in Kansas City, Missouri, praised Rolph and the people of California “for their noble example in dealing with criminals.”

But many people deplored the mob violence and Rolph’s praise of it. “The very spirit of government has been violated and the state has been disgraced in the eyes of the world by a brutal outburst of primitive lust for vengeance,” read a statement issued by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce and signed by several prominent Californians, including former President Herbert Hoover, a Republican like Rolph. “A horrible crime had been committed which deeply moved every citizen, but lynching is unjustifiable and subversive of all government. It was mob violence, marked by the most degrading brutality.”116

Two nights after the San Jose lynching, a mob estimated at seven thousand to nine thousand people broke into the jail in St. Joseph, Missouri, where Lloyd Warner, a nineteen-year-old black youth, was held on charges of sexually assaulting and beating a young white woman. Warner had declared that he was ready to plead guilty; months earlier, he had escaped prosecution for attacking a black woman.

Police officers, jail guards, and several dozen National Guard troops tried to hold back the mob. Army tanks chugged to the jail. One tank driver was yanked out of his machine, putting it out of action. The mob dragged Warner to the courthouse lawn and hanged him from a giant elm tree. Then several people in the mob splashed gasoline on the corpse and set it afire.

Meanwhile, a lynching case in Maryland was playing out differently. In Salisbury, on the eastern shore of Chesapeake Bay, a mob gathered on November 28 with the collective purpose of freeing several white men who were suspected of taking part in the lynching of a black man several weeks earlier in Princess Anne, Maryland.

Local prosecutors had shown no urgency in investigating the lynching of George Armwood, twenty-four, who was suspected of attacking an elderly white woman on a country road. Nor had area residents pressed for prosecution. So Governor Albert Ritchie called up a contingent of three hundred Maryland national guardsmen to round up the suspects.

A mob estimated at three thousand people congregated outside the National Guard