Ypsilanti's Fiends

It was growing dark in Ypsilanti, Mich., one evening last week when Thomas Wheatley, 17, drove up to the house of his friend Harry Lore, 16, jammed on the brakes and blew a long blast on the horn. Out of the house scrambled Lore and two Cleveland girls who were visiting at his home: his cousin, Vivian Gold, 15, and her friend, Anna May Harrison, 16. All piled into the car; Wheatley snapped on the lights, gave the horn another toot, and away they drove through the quiet streets of Ypsilanti to a cinema.

Just before the next dawn a farmer, looking out of his window some ten miles from Ypsilanti, beheld a bright light against the hooded sky. Hurrying across fields to a lonely road he found a car in flames. In the car were the incinerated bodies of Thomas Wheatley, Harry Lore, Vivian Gold, Anna May Harrison. On the running board, fenders, bumpers of the car were splashes of blood. A bloody wrench lay in the road. Officers who removed the bodies after the fire had died found two bullet holes in Lore, discovered the skulls of the other three had been beaten in. All had been gasoline-soaked. Lore's watch had stopped at 5:06.

County officers, State troopers and Ford Motor Co. service men mobilized for a manhunt. Two Negroes gave them warm clues. One said he had dreamed that three men did the murder. Later he had seen David Blackstone, a strapping Negro hot tamale peddler, and inquired: "How come you cut your hand, Hot Tamale?" whereupon Blackstone had begun to shake from head to foot. The other informer gave the police a pistol, said it had come from Blackstone's landlord. Before daybreak Blackstone had been arrested with Fred Smith, white ex-convict. All day they withstood questioning, finally broke down and confessed:

With Frank Oliver, a 19-year-old friend of Smith's, they had held up the car, robbed its occupants. When young Wheatley recognized Smith they had killed all four, driven into Ypsilanti with the bodies to get gasoline. Then they had taken the bodies out on the lonely road, soaked them with the gasoline, set fire to them. Oliver said Blackstone had raped Miss Harrison before the murders.

As police brought in Oliver and wrung a confession from him, the first of four lynching attempts occurred. Escaping the mob at Ypsilanti, the three were taken to the Ann Arbor jail, where a fresh mob gathered, tore at the prisoners' clothes, clawed their faces, cried for their blood. Reinforced by carloads of men from Ypsilanti, the crowd surged around the insecure jail, shouting: ''Lynch them! Burn them!" The three cowering men were rushed into automobiles and whisked to the court house where Judge George W. Sample was waiting. Said Judge Sample: "I feel like I am in the presence of fiends. I don't wonder that the crowd is howling for vengeance. . . . The law must take its course. The people of the State of Michigan have decreed that the penalty for this crime is life imprisonment. We all know that it doesn't make the penalty severe enough."* Then he sentenced each of the three to life imprisonment for each of the four murders, the sentences not to run concurrently, thus making parole or pardon next to impossible.

An hour later, with scores of motor-cycle policemen and deputies as guards, police issued from the court house with the prisoners, fired over the heads of the crowd, scattered tear gas bombs, and in the confusion herded the men into cars, roared away toward Jackson. Six hours and 40 minutes after their confession, Killers Smith, Oliver and Blackstone were in Jackson prison, to remain until taken to Marquette penitentiary for the rest of their natural lives.

*Michigan repealed its death penalty in 1845.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.