Morgue (15 page)

The personal papers from the wreckage held the key.

The two different identity cards held no obvious clues. The one for C. B. Robinson had a picture, W. H. Payne's didn't. The birthdates were similar, but not the same.

Will X.'s library card held no obvious clues either.

But on the back of one of the photos, someone had scrawled the name “Minnie” with an Alabama phone number.

Police detectives called and Minnie answered. She didn't know anybody named C. B. Robinson or W. H. Payne, but she admitted giving the photograph to her close friend Will X. several months earlier. She said Will always wore a gold earring in his pierced ear. Minnie didn't know where Will might be now, but she gave the cops a Detroit phone number where he might be reached.

The Detroit number was Will's employer, who confirmed that Will had been there earlier that same day. A few hours later, Will called the Medical Examiner's Office with a new piece of the puzzle. He knew W. H. Payne, who'd visited just a few weeks earlier. And the library card and Minnie's photo had been in his wallet, which he lost around the time Payne was visiting.

When asked to describe his friend Payne, Will said his only physical peculiarities were “a funny forehead hairline” and “patches of baldness.” Not only had we observed the corpse's irregular hairline and alopecia, but the photo on C. B. Robinson's identity card showed a similar hairline … but Will X. knew nobody named C. B. Robinson and had never heard Payne mention anybody by that name.

Finally we had somebody who might be able to visually identify our corpse. We believed C. B. Robinson and William H. Payne were probably the same person, but until Will X. looked at the Robinson photo or the dead man's face, we wouldn't have solid proof.

In the days before email or even common fax machines, we had to be creative. We asked a newspaper reporter to help us wire a photo to a Detroit TV station, where, at a time prearranged with Will X., the photo would be broadcast. Will X. had instructions to look at it and call us as soon as possible.

Well, it all fell apart in a flurry of technical difficulties, but the photo was published the next morning in the Detroit newspapers, and Will X. positively identified C. B. Robinson's identity-card photo as his friend William Payne.

Later in that third day since the Bel Air explosion, Payne's family rushed to Baltimore from Kentucky. They, too, recognized the C. B. Robinson photo before looking at the reconstructed face for a further, conclusive identification. It was definitely their twenty-six-year-old son and brother, William H. Payne.

*   *   *

Payne and Featherstone were key members of the faction that led a coup on the SNCC leadership in 1966. Although not as prominent in the movement as Featherstone, Payne played a behind-the-scenes role as one of Brown's most trusted lieutenants, one of his strong-arm goons.

Payne's history paralleled Featherstone's. He grew up the fourth of eight children in a lower-middle-class family and attended the University of Kentucky and Xavier University in Cincinnati. When he dropped out of Xavier in his junior year, he spent two years in the Navy before rejoining the SNCC as a field worker in the Deep South.

Friends described him as having “a general antipathy for whites.” At a recent Washington demonstration, Payne had interrupted the speakers and yelled, “Let's go home and get our guns—enough of this talking!”

His militancy earned him the nickname Che, after the violent revolutionary Che Guevara, but not everybody saw him that way.

“He wasn't any more militant than any of the rest of them,” his mother told a young
Washington Post
reporter named Carl Bernstein—still a few years before his Watergate reporting—when Payne was publicly identified as the second bomber. “Most young colored boys and girls are militant now. They're just not swallowing what the old folks swallowed.”

A few days before the blast, Payne had arrived in Washington from Atlanta for H. Rap Brown's trial. Friends told police he had arranged to meet with Featherstone and Brown in Bel Air that weekend.

Payne spent most of Monday, March 9, with Featherstone at the Drum and Spear Bookstore. Around two p.m., Featherstone borrowed a car from his neighbor, also a friend in the SNCC, but he didn't tell her where he was going and she didn't ask. A little after eight p.m., Featherstone closed the bookstore and left with Payne.

The last time anybody saw them alive was a few minutes later when Featherstone stopped briefly at his father's townhouse on Tenth Street NW.

Four hours later, they both lay in pieces on the asphalt outside Bel Air.

We concluded, officially, that Ralph E. Featherstone and William H. Payne (aka C. B. Robinson) died when a bomb they were transporting detonated prematurely at 11:42 p.m., March 9, 1970, on Route 1 just south of Bel Air, Maryland. The cause of death in both cases was massive trauma from a dynamite explosion. The manner of death was an accident, not a homicide.

The discrepancy between the Navy's dental records and the teeth in the corpse's mouth was never resolved. We assumed that the military records had been mixed up, not uncommon in those days, but we never solved that mystery.

And the FBI's bomb experts never pinpointed why the bomb went off. Did a nervous Payne accidentally set it off when a state trooper unexpectedly passed in the middle of the night? Had it been set to go off at the courthouse but never placed because of the police presence and never fully disarmed? Did a powerful electronic pulse from trooper Lastner's police radio trigger the detonator? We still don't know and never will.

A few days later, William H. Payne's family took his ruined body home. He was buried in a little cemetery on the outskirts of Covington, Kentucky, where every Memorial Day his grave is marked like every veteran's, decorated with the flag of a country he wanted to overthrow.

*   *   *

But where was H. Rap Brown, the elusive firebrand who'd set this tragedy in motion and kept America on the brink of chaos for several days? Had he slipped out of their grasp again?

Almost two months later, on May 5, 1970, the FBI added Brown to its Ten Most Wanted list. Post-office posters warned that he was likely armed and dangerous. “Where's Rap?” became a rallying cry among black radicals as cops everywhere in America looked for the incendiary rebel.

But Brown wasn't in the United States. He'd secretly fled to Tanzania, where many SNCC expatriates had gone.

Eighteen months later, a New York City cop shot an African-American man on a rooftop after a robbery at a West Side bar. The wounded man identified himself as Roy Williams.

But Roy Williams's fingerprints matched Hubert Gerold Brown, better known as H. Rap Brown. Charged with armed robbery and attempted murder of a policeman, Brown pleaded innocent. He was convicted after a ten-week trial and sent to New York's Attica Prison, where he converted to Islam and changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin.

Released in 1976 from Attica, Al-Amin moved to Atlanta, where he opened a small grocery store. SNCC had dissolved, and the old militants had died, moved on to new issues, or just given up. And H. Rap Brown, aka Al-Amin, claimed to be a changed man, too. He literally followed in his hero Malcolm X's footsteps by making a pilgrimage to Mecca. He told a newspaper reporter that Allah doesn't change societies until the individuals change themselves. He wrote about revolution through prayer and character, quite different from his warlike earlier book,
Die, Nigger, Die!

Soon he cofounded a mosque in Atlanta's West End, a mostly black enclave where he lived. Through programs of “spiritual regeneration,” he was credited with creating neighborhood patrols, starting youth programs, rescuing drug abusers, and all but cleansing the neighborhood of prostitution. He'd apparently evolved from a ferocious extremist to a merely passionate spiritual leader.

But not everybody was quick to applaud. The FBI had kept an eye on Al-Amin, amassing a 40,000-page file on him. Local cops secretly suspected him of murder, gunrunning, and at least one assault.

On March 16, 2000, a Fulton County sheriff's deputy was killed and another wounded in a shootout in the West End while trying to serve Al-Amin a warrant for an unpaid speeding ticket. He fled briefly before he was arrested. In 2002, he was convicted of first-degree murder and twelve other counts, and sentenced to life in state prison without the possibility of parole.

Georgia handed over the troublesome high-profile killer to federal authorities. Today he is in his seventies, incarcerated in the ADX Florence Supermax federal prison on the plains of Colorado with terrorists, cartel kingpins, mob hit men, and serial killers such as al Qaeda's Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, and Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols.

H. Rap Brown might have changed his spots, but deep down, he remained the sociopath who spawned a wave of domestic terror that has reverberated over more than forty years.

And I can't help but think that Ralph Featherstone and William Payne, among others, died for his sins.

 

‹ FIVE ›

Digging Up Lee Harvey Oswald

It's possible that we love our conspiracy theories because they almost always explain tragedy as an intentional act of people who are smarter and more powerful than we are. It's perversely reassuring somehow. Whether it's black helicopters, the Illuminati, Roswell, the moon landing, the collapse of the World Trade Center, or the assassination of President Kennedy, we simply don't want to believe we're wrong or unlucky, that Fate sometimes works against us, or that lone, deluded, lunatic punks can change the course of human history.

DALLAS, TEXAS. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1963.

Ninety minutes after the world watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald, the suspected assassin lay dead on a bloody operating table at Dallas's Parkland Hospital, mere steps from the room where President Kennedy was pronounced dead two days before (and in the same surgical room where Ruby himself would die a little more than three years later).

Ruby's .38-caliber bullet had entered Oswald's lower chest just below his left nipple and lodged in a noticeable lump under the skin on the right side of his back. It pierced nearly every major organ and blood vessel in his abdominal cavity—stomach, spleen, liver, aorta, diaphragm, renal vein, a kidney, and the inferior vena cava, a major vein that carries deoxygenated blood from the lower extremities back to the heart. Oswald bled out very quickly through a dozen or more holes. Trauma surgeons poured fifteen pints of blood into him and manually squeezed his faltering heart to revive it, but it simply stopped for good at 1:07 p.m. local time.

Oswald arrived for his autopsy already a chopped-up mess. The suspected assassin had endured a brutal two days since the president was shot. His left eye was bruised and his lip split while resisting arrest. His guts had been mortally shredded by a bullet fired point-blank into his chest. Emergency surgeons had tried to save him through a gaping, foot-long slit in his belly and another long slice near the entrance wound.

Dallas County medical examiner Earl Rose started his autopsy less than two hours after Oswald was pronounced dead. He was already cool to the touch. Blood, no longer being pumped by his dead heart, was pooling naturally in the corpse's hollows. Aside from the wounds of the past two days, Rose's external examination found nothing remarkable: The average-sized, wavy-haired, slightly balding man on Rose's slab had slate-blue eyes, decent oral hygiene, a few old scars, no sign of alcohol or drug abuse, a shaved chest and pubic area, and was in otherwise good physical shape, if you didn't count being dead.

Rose sawed open Oswald's skull to find a completely normal brain. Apart from his tattered innards and a heart roughly handled by his would-be lifesavers, Oswald's other vital organs appeared normal. Even his bowels went miraculously untouched by the bullet. So Rose sealed all of his severed parts in a beige plastic bag the size of a grocery sack, and tucked it in Oswald's abdominal cavity before sending him off to be prepared for a hurried burial the next day.

The autopsy had taken less than an hour.

At Miller's Funeral Home in Fort Worth, undertaker Paul Groody couldn't waste any time. On a hunch that Oswald would someday be exhumed, he pumped a double dose of embalming fluid into the body and dressed him off the funeral home's private rack: white boxers patterned with little green diamonds, dark socks, light shirt, thin black tie, and a cheap, dark brown suit whose trousers were cinched around the waist not by a belt but by an elastic band. Keeping with a typical custom, the corpse wore no shoes. The family was charged $48 for the going-away outfit.

Oswald's hair was washed and combed, his visible bruises were concealed with makeup, and his eyes and lips sealed for eternity.

Then Groody placed two rings on Oswald's fingers. One was a gold wedding band and the other a smaller ring with a red gemstone.

The body, looking presentable again, was laid in a $300 pine casket with a curved lid. Several photos were taken, a grave was reserved, $25 worth of flowers ordered, and Groody's clerk typed up a $710 invoice, due within ten days.

The assassin's burial—deliberately scheduled the next day around the same moment as the president's nationally televised funeral and the somber services for Officer J. D. Tippit to discourage any public mourning—were attended only by Oswald's small, destitute, shell-shocked family, a handful of reporters, and a local pastor who didn't know Oswald but believed no man should be buried without a prayer. Since nobody else came, six reporters were drafted as spur-of-the-moment pallbearers to lug his cheap pine casket to a mangy little rise at Rose Hill.

The Reverend Louis Saunders's eulogy had been painfully brief, partly because two other ministers had refused at the last minute out of fear they themselves would be assassinated by a sniper. He recited passages from the Twenty-third Psalm and John 14, then added only: