Natchez Neighbors

Before she shut herself up in her Natchez plantation home 40 years ago, Jane Surget ("Miss Jennie") Merrill, spinster, daughter of a onetime U. S. Minister to Belgium, was widely reputed for good looks and charm. Fortnight ago Miss Merrill emerged from her seclusion--a bullet-ridden corpse. Her murder not only stirred old memories among septuagenarians in Natchez but also gave romantics of the Southern press an opportunity to write floridly about departed social glories. The dead woman's father was Ayres P. Merrill, a friend of President Grant who sent him to Brussels. Oldtimers vaguely recall that Miss Merrill was presented at the Court of St. James. She was supposed to have been in love with Duncan Minor, who traced his lineage back to a Spanish Governor of the Louisiana territory, but they never married. For reasons unknown she withdrew to "Glenburney," the trim white family home a mile out from Natchez on the Kingston Road. A woman of means, she affected old-fashioned dress, lived in decent comfort, if not style. A frequent visitor at "Glenburney" was Duncan Minor, but to the rest of the world its doors were closed. Miss Merrill's body was found early one morning last week in a thicket a hundred yards from her home. The night before there had been screams, shots. A trail of blood led back to the veranda, through Miss Merrill's bedroom to the dining room. Early clues pointed to two of Miss Merrill's neighbors--scraggly, bearded Richard Dana, 61, who claims to be the nephew of the late great Charles Anderson Dana (New York Sun) and Miss Octavia Dockery, 60, daughter of a Confederate brigadier. Years ago the Merrills, Danas and Dockerys all moved in the same social circle of Natchez. "Dick" Dana, a gay young blade, suddenly retired to "Glenwood," his family's 90- year-old plantation home, a quarter mile from "Glenburney." Miss Dockery, unable to make a living by writing verse, moved in as his housekeeper, raised chickens, milked cows. Dana was mentally unbalanced. He used to wander into the woods, let his hair grow long, pretend to be a "wild man." Declared legally incompetent by the courts, he was placed under the guardianship of Housekeeper Dockery. "Glenwood," once a fine mansion, went to wrack & ruin. Chickens, ducks, pigs, goats, dogs roamed at will through its high-ceiled rooms. Filth and trash littered the floors. Old tin cans were strewn about a dusty library of fine volumes, furniture vanished in debris. The squalid scene with its half-mad characters was strongly suggestive of the morbid Southern melodramas of Mississippi's Author William Faulkner who specializes in social decay amid evil surroundings.

Miss Dockery's livestock used to stray over upon the "Glenburney" plantation. Once Miss Merrill was supposed to have shot into a herd of her goats. A strange "red, white & blue" pig also figured in the dispute. The feud between these reclusive neighbors several times overflowed into the local courts. The Dana-Dockery indictments were based principally on fingerprints found in "Glenburney." After being held in jail ten days, Dana and Miss Dockery were released and police continued to arrest every suspicious person in the neighborhood.

Miss Merrill left her estate, valued at $175,000, to Duncan Minor. He hired a private detective to help solve the crime.

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